


The Basilisk's Tongue

by LadyDuskandDawn



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Cunnilingus, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Gaslighting, Manipulation, Possessive Behavior, Power Dynamics, Psychopaths In Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-02-19 04:13:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22771714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyDuskandDawn/pseuds/LadyDuskandDawn
Summary: It starts out innocent, as it always does.And yet by the time she finds herself deeply entangled in a seductive web of deceit—woven by the seemingly perfect Head Boy—it is far too late.AU. Tomione.
Relationships: Hermione - Relationship, Hermione Granger/Tom Riddle
Comments: 108
Kudos: 529
Collections: Tomione





	1. Chapter 1

" _The Slytherins are here_."

Hermione went deathly still, every inch of her muscles tensing at Ron's low and acrimonious voice.

Despite knowing better, she looked up from her plate of toast at the newcomers stepping into the Great Hall for breakfast. All the familiar faces were there: Avery, Antonin Dolohov, Lucius Malfoy, Corban Yaxley, Alphard Black, Rodolphus Lestrange, and of course, there was Tom Riddle.

Out of all those sneering faces, his stood out the most, which was hardly surprising because his was the only face that wasn't sneering and, of course, since he was the leader of the group. The dynamics had never been explicitly stated, but it was obvious enough from how he walked quietly in front of them, with none of the other Slytherins even daring to step alongside him.

It would have been easy to regard him with contempt, Hermione thought, but most people didn't. She wouldn't say she liked him because of the company he kept, but contempt? 

No, he was too polite for that. He left her alone, and that was enough. While most Slytherins made no secret of their endless mockery and loathing for Muggle-borns, she had never witnessed Tom Riddle expressing any form of prejudice towards anyone, regardless of their blood status. He was unwaveringly urbane and pleasant to everyone, and partly because of that, he was the first Slytherin in many years to be made Head Boy.

There was, of course, also his academic brilliance, which was what truly fascinated her most about him. He had scored at the top of his cohort every year leading up his current seventh, just as she had scored at the top of her cohort that was two years behind his own. As of late, there had been much buzz about his being awarded the Medal for Magical Merit by the Headmaster, and it was a prize an ambitious Hermione was eagerly eyeing as well.

The problem with that was, despite scoring at the top of her cohort, that was only compared to her peers of that cohort. Based on Riddle's groundbreaking records, his annual examination scores had been higher than hers throughout all four years of her studies thus far.

Veering near on arrogance on her part, she had never thought that was possible.

"Miserable, nasty twats," Ron muttered over a swig of pumpkin juice.

Harry, like Hermione, didn't say anything. She glanced over at the subdued bespectacled boy, then looked away, struggling to suppress the swelling of emotion in her chest.

Harry had never been the same since Hagrid's expulsion a year ago. 

She shook her head. She didn't want to think about the nightmare that had transpired so long ago. No one in Hogwarts could forget the attacks. The terror, the devastation—and the doubt.

She'd lived in bone-chilling fear for weeks, wondering every sleepless night if she would be next in line to the Muggle-borns that had been found Petrified in the corridors of the castle.

Or if her fate was twisted enough, she could have ended up like Myrtle Warren.

Hogwarts had been her home, her haven. To have something she'd considered her refuge upturned was... discombobulating, to say the least.

And if— _if—_ Riddle had been right, then Hagrid had betrayed her in the worst way possible. She remembered him showing her with relish the egg he'd acquired. 

The egg that had hatched an Acromantula; the monster responsible for the terrible attacks.

Hermione expelled a breath, swigging from her own cup of pumpkin juice. There was no point in dwelling about that now. Riddle had exposed Hagrid, and regardless of Hagrid's innocence, the deed was done. Hagrid was expelled and gone.

Only Harry had never forgiven Riddle for it.

"So how was working for Riddle on the train like?" Ron asked.

"Uh…" Hermione straightened on the bench, grabbing the remains of her buttered toast and finishing it with a hefty bite. Though she knew he would never admit it, Ron envied that she'd obtained her prefect badge at the start of their fifth year. It was something he'd coveted for ages considering many of his siblings had been prefects as well. "Well, he was very polite. Not rude or arrogant at all. He briefed us what to do, and that's about it. Then we all went our separate ways to patrol the train."

It was the truth. Riddle had been so gracious, so unlike the quintessential Slytherin, but at the same time brief and matter-of-fact, appearing notably detached from all the female prefects who'd been simpering away. After giving them the necessary instructions, they had all been dismissed to perform their duties, and that was that.

"Well, that sounded fun," Ron groused. He was absent-mindedly trying to levitate a cup of coffee over, and Hermione found her temper brewing at his dismal attempts. 

"Merlin's beard, Ronald!" she exclaimed exasperatedly, irked as she always was by any signs of incompetence. "We were taught this in our first year—how are you failing at the incantation four years later? It's Wingardium Lei‐ _o‐_ sa, not Levio- _sa._ "

With that, she waved her own wand emphatically and levitated the cup over towards them with a dexterity he had sorely lacked. It set itself down neatly on the table in front of Ron's reddened face. 

"Bloody hell, Hermione," he snapped, darting his mortified eyes around the curious onlookers in the Great Hall. "Obviously I know how to perform the charm, I just wasn't paying attention—"

"Well, then you should have paid attention," Hermione retorted superciliously. "You're a fifth-year now, Ron! You need to set an example to those younger than us, not display your ineptitude for everyone to—"

Her voice died in her throat at the tall, slender boy walking from across them, headed for the exit of the Great Hall. 

Riddle. 

He'd finished breakfast, she realised.

For a fleeting moment, his bottomless dark eyes met hers, and while frozen, she could have sworn she recognised a glimmer in those irises. 

Faint amusement.

Then the moment was over, and it was like his sidelong glance at the Griffindors' table had never occurred. He continued walking gracefully away, a book held in his hand, seemingly oblivious to the attention he drew from every occupant in the hall.

And then he was gone from the Great Hall in a heartbeat, his immaculate emerald-lapelled Slytherin robe billowing softly behind him. 

* * *

Hermione sighed as she made her way towards a wooden table situated in an alcove inside the Hogwarts Library, her arms loaded with a heap of parchment and tomes. Ron was still aggrieved with her over their little spat in the morning, and Harry was awkwardly stuck in the middle, as he often was during their frequent fights. Not wanting to study in the Gryffindor common room with Ron glaring holes into the back of her head, she'd decided on the library to catch up with her studying.

She didn't care if it was the start of the school year, that their examinations were still far, far away. If she wanted to continue staying ahead of the curve, she would need to make a head start as she always did. It was evident many students didn't mirror the sentiment judging by the deserted library. 

Well, it was a bonus in Hermione's opinion. It meant more peace and quiet, and less of the repugnant hanky-panky from other students between the library shelves. Still, she was a prefect now. She could penalise them if she ever caught so much as a whiff of such behaviour. Satisfied by the thought, she dumped her leather-bound books and parchment on the table with a faint groan of relief, and started unravelling them carefully. 

Hermione had just seated herself comfortably and dipped her quill into her ink bottle when something—only she didn't know what—made her look up and across the rows of dusty tables of the library. 

The hand holding her quill went rigid.

A dark-haired figure sat alone by a table a good distance away from her towards the other side of the library, his own quill held elegantly in his long-fingered hand as he wrote something on a scroll of parchment, a heavy tome opened beside said parchment. 

Hermione blinked, struggling to make sense of what she was seeing. It was extremely rare to see Tom Riddle without the company of his Slytherin followers, his Head Boy duties notwithstanding. She was aware, of course, that he shared her voracious appetite for reading, and that he visited the library as regularly as she did, but she didn't remember being alone with him before.

If he'd noticed her, which he must have unless he was deaf or blind, he exhibited no sign of acknowledgement. It was as if she didn't exist in the room at all. Instead, he merely continued writing on his parchment with clever, confident twists of his fair hand, his charcoal lashes splayed across his pale cheekbones. Intrigued, she noted a signet ring on his middle finger. 

It was too far away for Hermione to properly make out the scratches on the dark stone of his ring. She considered it incredible that she could tell there were scratches at all.

How strange. From what she'd heard, Riddle possessed no distinct heritage in the wizarding world. He did not hail from an aristocratic family. Why, then, did he have a ring? Was it a gift from the Malfoys or the Blacks, perhaps?

No. All of Hermione's instincts rioted against that notion. While she did not know Riddle well, she could guess that he did not accept charities from anyone. Maybe it was because of pride, or maybe there was something else. She wasn't sure what.

Blinking, she averted her brown eyes to her own parchment. What was she doing anyway, analysing Riddle? She was here to study—nothing else.

She did feel slightly confused and perturbed that he hadn't acknowledged her at all, though. He'd been perfectly friendly with her back at the Hogwarts Express when he'd met all the new prefects, and had even asked for all of their names and had them introduce themselves so he could welcome them properly.

It was a far cry from how he was blatantly ignoring Hermione now. She started writing on her parchment, trying to blot out her tumultuous thoughts. If Ron or Harry was here, she could guess what they would say.

"It's because you're a Muggle-born, Hermione!" Ron would hiss. "He's no different from those other Slytherin toerags, after all."

That made no sense. If he was prejudiced towards Muggle-borns, why was he always friendly to them? He definitely hadn't been unwelcoming or hostile to her in any way back on the train.

Unless it was an act, of course, but she knew she was sounding increasingly paranoid for even thinking so far.

Hermione shook her frizzy head, driving her asinine thoughts out. She wasn't here to gain the mysterious Head Boy's favour. 

She was here to break the records he'd set.

The next half an hour passed in silence save for the stabs of quills against parchment, and soon enough, she found herself forgetting about Riddle altogether. Instead, her attention was captured by a single line in her textbook. 

_"A bezoar is a stone-like mass taken from the stomach of a goat, that acts as an antidote to most poisons, with a notable exception."_

An exception? What exception? She ran a baffled hand through her bushy brown hair, the fingers of her other hand rifling through the sepia pages of the leather-bound tome as she searched for an elaboration.

There was none. 

_What the…?_

Hermione read through the book furiously, even going to the index at the front to check through its content, but she could find none of the answers she sought. She slammed the book shut, then started leafing through her other voluminous books in a frenzy.

Nothing. 

Nothing at all. 

Hermione slumped against her ladderback chair, staring at her opened, strewn books on the mahogany table in aghast. How could they not contain such a crucial fact? What was she supposed to do if a question about the exception to the bezoar's antidotal properties surfaced in the examination? 

It was a question she could not afford to lose points on—for all she knew, it might be the one thing she could wield as an edge against the other students! 

She decided then that she would have to personally ask one of the professors. Perhaps Professor Dumbledore. He seemed the most astute amongst the professors here. 

Hermione promptly stood up and waved her wand so that all of her books closed and arranged themselves into pristine piles, while the parchment scrolls rolled themselves up. She tucked her wand in her robe and gathered the items up into her arms, then stiffened. 

She felt it then: an unsettling sensation of being watched.

The girl instantly looked across the tables to the other sole occupant of the library. 

He was still reading his book. It was a different book from before, and his scroll of parchment had been kept away, but he was clearly engrossed by the book he was reading, one aristocratic ringed hand resting idly on the page. 

In the back of her mind, she marvelled at how rare it was to find someone who possessed the same mental capacity to pore over books for as long as she did. Half an hour was about as long as either Ron or Harry could take.

Yet as Riddle read and ignored her, it was just like before: as if she didn't exist to him at all.

She squirmed in discomfort, skin flushing. Had she imagined the sensation?

Feeling cross with herself and attempting to ignore her erratic heartbeat, she propelled herself to the exit of the library, her arms laden with her belongings.

And even despite the return of the disarming sensation of imaginary dark eyes drilling into her back, she continued bolting out of the library without a backwards glance. 

She didn't dare to.

* * *

She was still thinking about it even as she patrolled the second floor of the castle that night, her prefect badge shiny and polished on her chest. 

The bezoar conundrum, that was, _not_ Riddle.

None of the professors had materialised at the Great Hall during dinner, and she'd made sure to loiter around even after she'd finished her meal. Eventually, after waiting for eons, she'd given up and headed for Gryffindor Tower to get some rest before she went for her night patrols later.

Tempted as she'd been to visit Professor Dumbledore at his office, she knew an academic question wasn't enough to warrant a private visit. It would have been intrusive and unnecessary, and she'd decided wisely that it was best to wait until classes tomorrow before making her enquiries. 

Examinations were still a long way from now, and she wasn't in a hurry. At least, she told herself she wasn't. It went against her almost irrationally studious nature not to obtain the answers she wanted right away, but she knew it was an internal battle she would have to overcome.

Passing through the girls' bathroom on the second floor now, Hermione paused. She was sure she had heard a sound—an indistinct, stifled laugh, maybe. It was already late, way past curfew hours. Narrowing her hazel eyes, she swivelled around and ventured purposefully towards the gloomy entrance of the bathroom, lighting her wand.

Upon entering the dark dingy bathroom, the sphere of light at the end of her wand soon illuminated a boy and girl crouched surreptitiously under a basin. They were snuggling with each other and caught in a liplock that frankly repulsed her to her very core. How they found the mood to be amorous with their less-than pleasant surroundings—the floor was uncomfortably damp, the mirrors were cracked, and the wooden doors to the nearby stalls were flaking—she had no idea.

But then again, Hermione supposed the alternative meant being separated in their respective dormitories for the night, which was probably worse to them.

"Oi, you two!" she barked, and they both jumped, the boy banging his head against the aged sink with a yelp. She dimly recognised them: they were both fourth-years from different houses, but she couldn't remember their names.

"It's already eleven and an hour past curfew," Hermione went on, glaring at their defiantly glowering faces. "What in the name of Merlin are you doing here?"

The girl, a pretty redhead with blue eyes from Ravenclaw whose name Hermione could not recall, thrust out her chin mutinously.

"We just wanted to see each other, is all," she said. "Not breaking the law, innit?"

"I don't know about the law, but you both definitely broke curfew," Hermione said tersely. "For that, I'm afraid I'm going to have to give you both detention. And—"

"No, don't!" the boy cried, but she interrupted him. 

"Five points from Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff," she announced. "Now go back to your dormitories immediately."

The girl looked livid. 

"You could have just given us detention!" she burst out. "You didn't have to take points off and affect the others—"

"I _said_ , go back to your dormitories," Hermione ordered sharply. "If you don't, I'll take off more points."

"You—you— _bitch!_ " the girl exclaimed furiously, ignoring her boyfriend's horrified gasp as he tugged desperately at her sleeve. "You think I don't know you, don't you? You're that little know-it-all bitch from Gryffindor. We all know about you. You think you're so clever, but you're just a stuck-up—"

A white-hot haze of fury had seized hold of Hermione, and she found herself shaking violently as she spoke again, her voice glacial and laced with rage. "Ten points from Ravenclaw."

The redhead lurched inelegantly to her feet, her complexion matching the shade of her hair. 

"You bloody—" she clamoured, and the haze of fury that consumed Hermione intensified.

"Fifteen points from Ravenclaw," she seethed. "Keep talking, and I'll keep taking them off." Unable to stop herself, she said, "And I'll go up to thirty. Double each time."

The redhead shut her mouth, her pupils dilated, and then, without any warning at all, she lunged at Hermione, her hands balled into fists. 

The boy screamed. 

Hermione might have screamed too, but her throat had clamped up with shock, and all the air seemed to be trapped in her lungs as the redhead loomed over her, pretty features twisted with hate. 

Hermione stared, and comprehension began to sink into her stupefied mind.

The redhead wasn't moving. She was frozen in that position, her hands still balled into fists, her face contorted in that terrible expression, body suspended partially in mid-air. 

The Freezing Charm, Hermione recognised. 

Driven by some instinct, the prefect turned her russet head towards the entrance of the lavatory.

Tom Riddle stood calmly in the doorway, holding his wand. She gawped at him in disbelief.

She hadn't heard him say the incantation, which meant he'd performed a nonverbal spell. She had yet to learn that form of magic until the sixth year (but had been secretly attempting it in her dormitory) and watching it being demonstrated completely took her aback.

"R–Riddle," the male Hufflepuff gasped, the colour draining from his face at the appearance of the Head Boy. "Oh no…"

The Head Boy's appearance was like cold water being thrown at Hermione as well. She felt abruptly abashed and mortified.

Tonight was her first night patrol as a prefect, and she had let her temper get a hold of her, causing things to escalate to the point that a student had tried to attack her.

Even if the student had been at fault, she had also been tactless and unrefined in disciplining that student.

Soundlessly, Riddle approached the immobilised redhead, those endless dark tunnels for eyes gazing at her frozen face.

"I trust you'll be calm when I release you, Miss Clarkson," he said quietly in that deep silken baritone, and Hermione realised with a jolt that he remembered her name. "If you choose to kick up any more of a fuss, I'll have no choice but to personally escort you to Professor Flitwick."

He didn't move or speak for several drawn-out seconds, letting his words sink in—and letting her consider her options, Hermione thought.

Or, she thought again, letting her register who was in power in that instance.

Riddle lowered his wand, and just like that, the spell broke, and the redhead collapsed to the wet floor, gasping and trembling. The Hufflepuff boy looked like he wanted to scamper to her side, but his eyes darted from Riddle's patrician, inexpressive features to the redhead.

"Please return to your dormitories now," Riddle said softly. "I will speak to both of you myself tomorrow. For now, you'll find Clearwater outside—she will escort you both to your dormitories."

There was a pause, and both the redhead and the boyfriend exchanged stricken glances at each other. Hermione understood why; after what they had just done, especially attempting to assault a prefect, there ought to be more repercussions. 

Yet all Riddle had said was that he would speak to them personally the next day. Somehow that came off more disturbing. 

It made what awaited them all the more nebulous.

"Is there a problem?" Riddle said vaguely, with distant interest. 

"No, no!" Both boy and girl shook their heads frantically, before scrambling together in unrehearsed tandem for the exit of the lavatory, their footfalls echoing raucously across the walls.

And then, for the second time today, she found herself alone with Tom Riddle.

He said nothing even as those black holes for eyes settled upon her, and she stared back, looking at the sleek raven hair, the milky-white, angular features of his handsome face, the hollowed cheeks, and the pale sculpted mouth. He was so immaculate, so put together, so elegant, that she felt frizzier than ever looking at him, with her bushy hair, pink cheeks, and the turbulent emotions rampaging through her too-tight chest.

She began fumbling to break the godawful silence.

"I should have done that better," Hermione said, folding her hands primly together to compose herself. "I lost my temper. I apologise."

She had also overdone it with the number of points she had deducted. As a prefect, she knew there was a threshold to the number of points she could deduct.

He continued looking at her, and Hermione's heart suddenly stuttered in her ribs. It was hard to tell in the dimness of the light because of the few candles lit inside the bathroom—and because her wand had been extinguished and Riddle hadn't illuminated his—but she could have sworn that the very corners of his pale lips were lifted upwards. 

_Was he… smiling?_

Then he canted his dark head sideways so that the entirety of his regal face came out of the shadows and into the candlelight, and she saw there was no smile at all. His countenance was placid and emotionless.

She furrowed her brows. She must had imagined it.

"We all make mistakes for the first time," Riddle responded, studying her with those cool, unfathomable abysses for eyes. "It would be a lie to say I haven't made a fair share of my own in the past."

Somehow, Hermione doubted that. 

Inadvertently, a stray thought came to her head, and she squared her shoulders, half-wondering if she should go ahead with her sudden idea.

What was the harm? she pondered. The worst case scenario would simply be that he didn't know.

"Can I ask you something, Riddle?" Hermione asked breathlessly.

A single dark eyebrow rose.

"You may," Riddle said, and this time she was sure of the amusement in his obsidian eyes.

"I would just like to know," Hermione went on eagerly, "if you happen to know what the exception to the bezoar's antidotal properties is. It seems it cures most poisons save for an exception."

There was a moment, and Riddle stared hard at her, seemingly enraptured for reasons she could not fathom. When he spoke again, however, his voice was quiet and unassuming; at odds with the glint in his eyes.

"There is more than one exception," he said.

"Well, could you give me an example of one?" Hermione probed impatiently. Then, discovering that she might be coming off rude, she flushed, then said in her own most deferential tone, "Only if you're all right with it, of course. I know you're doing me a favour, and I appreciate it."

"Not at all," Riddle said softly, but she could feel those dark, dark eyes searching her face and making her feel quite bare. "If you'd like an example, I can give you one… such as venom, Miss Granger."

"Venom? Like what, from a spider?"

"No," he said. He enunciated his words slowly. "Something else."

"I don't—" Hermiome was bewildered and frustrated. "Look here, how did you find the answer? I read all the books I could get my hands on, and I didn't find anything of the—"

"If you want to learn," Riddle said quietly, "it won't be enough to read what is given to you. You will need to push…"

"Push—?" Hermione's bewilderment mounted. 

"Push the boundaries of your imagination," he said, with a little gleam in those pitless black eyes. "You will need to step further than where you stand. You will have to step outside the box, Miss Granger..." 

What? What the hell did that mean?

He observed his wand held in his ringed hand, and then looked back up to smile politely at her.

"I apologise," he said. "It's late. You should return to your patrol now."

"What?" Hermione was thrown. "Wait! You haven't told me—"

"If you'd like to know more, I will tell you more," he said, with a half-smile. "But tonight, you will need to finish your patrol. I'm afraid duty awaits, Miss Granger—for both of us. I have work to do as well."

Hermione faltered, but reality set in. He was not obliged to help her in the first place. She was the one that had botched how she had handled the situation tonight, and now she was pestering him to tutor her instead of resuming her job.

"I'm sorry," she said, biting her lip, feeling most displeased with herself. "I… I'll go."

Not knowing what else to say, she left the toilet rapidly, making sure to keep her head held high despite her frazzled nerves. She could feel her skin itching with the acute, lingering awareness of dark eyes drilling holes into her back, and she swallowed, her gait unsteady. 

This time, she knew for sure that it was not her imagination. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I have some things planned in store, and I would really love to find out if you guys would like to read more! 
> 
> Regardless, I appreciate you guys dropping by!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should probably add that if anyone expects this Tom to be a nicer or more morally redeemable Tom, this isn't the case.
> 
> At all.
> 
> This Tom is no different from canon!Tom, I'm afraid. 
> 
> EDIT: To elaborate further, this AU is basically one where Hermione (along with a few other familiar faces in Harry's canon timeline) exists in the same timeline as Tom's whilst he was schooling. Other than that, I intend to follow through with a good chunk of the books' canon events, though the concept of Tomione obviously deviates from canon and will to some degree warp certain future events, amongst other things. I'm also tweaking a few minor characters here and there.

Hermione awoke to the _tap-tap-tap_ of a beak pecking against glass. She sat up drowsily on her bed, throwing her blanket to the side, a hand rising to brush thick curtains of her bushy hair from her face. It took her several seconds before she registered a tawny owl perched outside her dormitory window, the shaded gold of the barely rising sun highlighting its frame.

Quick as a flash, she leapt to her feet and hastened towards the slightly stained glass, not wanting the owl to awaken any of her dormmates. She reached towards the windowsill and shoved the window up, letting the owl in. It fluttered in and dropped an envelope directly in her hand.

She had just gripped the envelope in her palm when the owl turned haughtily and took off into the sky with a flourish of tawny feathers. The girl blinked, then shut the window before redirecting her attention to the envelope. The envelope was blank and unsigned. 

And yet somehow, Hermione had a feeling she knew whom it came from.

She hurried to her bed, and opened the envelope, retrieving a small note from within it. The handwriting was neat, like her own, but it differed from hers for its beautiful, exquisite cursive—it was so breathtakingly vintage and lovely it seemed almost feminine, like an artefact from a different timeline altogether. Even the 'Y's were looped. For a second she couldn't breathe.

It was so different from what she was used to from the boys around her; for Ron and Harry's handwriting was such a messy, crude scrawl it was nearly impossible to decipher what they were writing sometimes. It was exceedingly rare to see anything as cultured and pretty as this.

She perused the note.

_"Dear Miss Granger,_

_Based on the previous night, I see you have questions. I would be humbled to be of assistance—assuming, of course, that you choose not to consult the far more erudite professors._

_I will be passing by the prefects' bathroom tonight at half past ten. If you have made up your mind, you know where and when to find me."_

The note was unsigned, and Hermione jumped when a flame erupted from the top of the parchment before spreading to the rest of the page. She was forced to let go of the parchment with a soundless yelp of shock as the note was devoured within seconds by the fire before vanishing altogether with faint wisps of smoke.

The smoke was the only sign the note had existed at all, and as Hermione turned to find the envelope, she saw similar grey tendrils of smoke where said envelope had last been placed on top of her pillow.

An advanced charm, she thought, designed to destroy the letter once the recipient had read it.

For a long moment, Hermione sat there, at a loss for words. The other girls in the dormitory remained fast asleep in their beds, oblivious to what had just transpired.

Even though it had been unsigned, she knew perfectly well whom the letter had come from. And evidently the writer of the letter had predicted she would be able to hazard a guess.

Damn it. Her fingers twitched as she silently cursed the charm that had been cast on the letter. A part of her longed to pan the now-vanished letter more, to study the foreign, exquisite handwriting, to try to process the reality of the famous Head Boy writing to her. Now that the letter was gone, it didn't feel so much like reality anymore.

It felt surreal, and she found herself wanting more than anything to find evidence that she hadn't imagined the letter.

Why had he cast the charm? Hermione couldn't understand it. What was so incriminating about the letter that he had chosen to destroy it?

_—assuming, of course, that you choose not to consult the far more erudite professors._

He was right. Why consult him, when she could consult the professors? 

But this was Tom Marvolo Riddle: his twelve Outstanding O.W.L.s—thus making him eligible for all N.E.W.T subjects this year, all of which he had enrolled for—and exceptional performance reinforcing his status thus far as the most brilliant student in Hogwarts' history, behind only Professor Dumbledore himself.

Of course, no matter how brilliant he was, consulting a professor would be wiser, she was sure.

Yet…

_"You will need to push the boundaries of your imagination…"_

She shut her eyes.

_"—you will have to step outside the box, Miss Granger."_

Hermione opened her eyes again. She wanted an answer, she told herself. She needed answers about all those incomprehensible things he'd said, and she needed answers that the letter she had just read was real.

After all, if there was one thing Hermione Granger simply could not stand, it was ignorance.

* * *

"Blimey, you look terrible, Hermione," Ron told her in a muffled voice over a massive mouthful of toast and jam. "Was last night's patrol that bad?"

Harry winced, and nudged Ron from where he was seated on the bench beside him, but it was too late.

"What do you mean, I look terrible?" Hermione said annoyedly.

"Well, you've got eye circles the size of—"

"I think you look fine, Hermione," Harry interrupted quickly, waving his wand to refill his tea.

"Thank you, Harry," Hermione said, with an acidic look at Ron. She picked up her cup of tea. "And last night's patrol was—well, it was…" She sipped delicately, deciding against spilling the details. "It was fine."

Both Harry and Ron goggled at her, having picked up on her odd tone.

Harry hesitated. "Did something happen?" he asked.

She didn't know exactly why she was holding back the truth, but she supposed one reason was her reluctance to admit how she'd lost control with the Ravenclaw girl. She didn't need Ron getting on her back about it when she had only told him off yesterday about his own incompetence.

As for the other reason...

"Nothing," Hermione answered. "I just didn't sleep too well last night. I was thinking about the Draught of Living Death. You know it's been troubling me lately."

Ron rolled his blue eyes.

"Are you still on about that?" he demanded. "Merlin's beard, Hermione, you've harassed Fred and George and all the other seventh-years in Gryffindor enough about it. For the last time, we won't even study it until our sixth year, and that's assuming we pass an O.W.L for Potions! I don't understand why you've already tried making it—"

"Passing an O.W.L might be an assumption for you, but for me it's an obvious outcome," Hermione, who planned to obtain an 'Outstanding' for not only Potions but every subject, said pointedly. "Anyway, I've followed the instructions in the textbook to a tee, and I still can't comprehend why it won't turn out right."

She remembered what Fred had said after she'd asked him. 

"The Draught of Living Death lives up to its title, Hermione," he'd said solemnly. "It's literal living death to try to concoct it. Everyone in sixth year knows it's a notorious nightmare. No one in the cohort's ever concocted it perfectly save for Deborah Simmons from Ravenclaw and, of course, Mr. Perfect Head Boy himself—Tom Riddle. No surprise that they're both in the Slug Club."

Unsurprisingly, that piece of news had only made Hermione all the more determined to get the potion right. She was the top of _her_ cohort, just like the two students had been in Fred's cohort. She had to get it right like the two of them had.

She'd lost count of the number of times she'd ventured to an empty classroom with her textbook laid open beside her, an enormous cauldron on the other side of her. She'd followed the instructions repeatedly, rereading and rereading them to make sure she got them right before carrying them out.

Yet instead of the pale pink colour the completed potion should have undertaken, it had been a deep maroon.

It was absolutely maddening!

Hermione was roused from her frustration, however, when Harry abruptly tensed on the bench opposite her.

It wasn't hard to figure out why when she followed the direction of his flinty stare. Standing in the doorway of the Great Hall was the familiar detestable flock of Slytherins, their lips curled in condescending sneers as they looked at the Gryffindors' table. 

But the object of Harry's hateful scrutiny was the tall, elegant raven-haired boy standing at the forefront of the group.

Hermione swallowed, her heart performing a mad flip in her chest. She searched Tom Riddle's sculpted face, reading for any indication or acknowledgment that he had written the letter to her this morning.

Whatever she was hoping to see, though, she didn't see it. He wasn't even looking in the Gryffindors' direction.

Instead, he was speaking with Malfoy. The other Slytherins, though, were jeering at Harry. 

"What's wrong, Potter?" Lestrange mocked loudly with a vicious snicker. "Still hung up over that nasty giant oaf you used to call your friend? I can't say I feel the same. Good riddance to bad rubbish, don't you agree? Everyone's beyond _relieved_ Tom got him expelled, so—"

" _Harry!_ " Hermione hissed, but it was too late. Ron tried to grab Harry's robe sleeve but the agitated bespectacled boy ducked away and made a beeline straight for Riddle and his Slytherin friends, his face contorted with unadulterated rage.

Everyone in the Great Hall went silent, their eyes fixed on the commotion. The air was charged and silent; every onlooker was holding their breath. 

All of the Slytherins immediately had their wands out, but to Hermione's surprise—and mild relief—Riddle held up a ringed hand in warning, and his followers went stock-still. Strangely enough, Riddle didn't whip out his own wand, even though Hermione was certain he could have done so in a heartbeat.

Harry reached Riddle and seized violent fistfuls of his pristine Slytherin robes. He was so angry he was practically spitting into the other boy's calm face. 

He was also so angry he clearly couldn't assemble enough brainpower to use his wand. Instead, he settled for brute, mindless violence, one fist cocked back to punch Riddle in the face. 

"MR. POTTER!"

Hermione and Ron, already out of their seats, both blanched when they saw Professor Slughorn rushing toward them with impressive velocity considering his immense weight. The plump wizard looked beside himself with displeasure, the buttons of his straining waistcoat wobbling with affront.

"Mr. Potter!" Slughorn cried incredulously. "What in Merlin's beard do you think you are doing? Release Tom at once!"

Harry had frozen at Slughorn's incensed shout the first time, his fist clenched so tightly his knuckles were bone-white, but his fist remained suspended in the air instead of making contact with Riddle's face.

Then slowly—with blatant resentment that bubbled and stewed in his emerald eyes—Harry lowered his pale-knuckled fist and let go of Riddle.

"I cannot believe you, Mr. Potter!" Slughorn sputtered, his moustache quivering. Everyone knew by now that Riddle was the shining star of his Slug Club, and Hermione groaned inwardly at Harry's brashness for coming after Riddle in front of not just everyone at the Great Hall but also Slughorn, who had been having breakfast at the teachers' table. "The audacity—to even attack my Head Boy—"

"It's all right, sir," Riddle said quietly. "I'm sure Potter didn't mean it."

"Goodness gracious, Tom, you're too soft-hearted for your own good!" Slughorn shook his straw-haired head in appall. "Mr. Potter's behaviour is absolutely unacceptable. Twenty points from Gryffindor, and you'll be having detention tonight, Mr. Potter!"

The other Slytherins' mouths cracked into barely suppressed smirks. The retaliatory seething glare Ron sent them was pure poison.

Harry stiffened, his green eyes flashing. He opened his mouth to no doubt make an aggravated protest, but Hermione cut him short.

"Harry understands, Professor," she said quickly, nudging the boy. "He understands perfectly. Don't you, Harry?"

Harry hissed at her, but she could tell from the restrained ferocity on his features that he was trying his utmost not to let his temper get the best of him again. 

What Slughorn did not understand—and it was a strange inkling Hermione had that she couldn't explain properly—was that Tom was not exactly being as soft-hearted and magnanimous as the professor was making him out to be, and it was an epiphany that hit Hermione like a fist to her stomach. 

She had seen Tom using the Freezing Charm to immobilise the Ravenclaw girl yesterday when she had tried to assault Hermione. He could have easily done the same to Harry today to prevent the situation from escalating. So why didn't he?

If he'd stood by and done nothing, which had just about encapsulated his response today, then Harry _would_ have succeeded in assaulting him in front of everyone at the Great Hall (assuming no teacher had intervened). 

Harry, friend and ardent defender of Rubeus Hagrid, the half-giant behind the notorious, horrendous attacks on Muggle-born students, including one that had culminated in a murder. Nearly the entire school would have witnessed Harry going after the Head Boy today.

And Tom, who had done nothing to defend himself, who had refused to retaliate…

He had stood by and allowed the situation to escalate, to have Harry carry through with his assault. 

What he had really done, Hermione concluded numbly, was allow a foolish Harry to assume a villainous role in front of everyone, whilst Tom's was that of a victim.

Why?

* * *

"Treacle Tart," Hermione said to the door, situated not far from the statue of Boris the Bewildered. 

The door creaked open. Hermione slipped inside and carefully shut the door behind her, looking warily around the interior of the room. Her breath caught as she took in the magnificence of the prefect's bathroom for the first time. 

It was gently illuminated by a grandiose candle-filled chandelier, and the furnishings were made of pale marble, including what resembled an empty, rectangular swimming pool sunk into the middle of the floor. About a hundred golden taps adorned the pools edges, each with a differently coloured jewel set into its handle. Long white linen curtains draped the windows; a big heap of fluffy towels sat in a corner, and there was a single golden-framed painting on the wall. It featured a blonde mermaid in the midst of slumber on a rock, her lengthy hair framing her face. It fluttered every time she snored.

Feeling a touch overwhelmed, Hermione sat down on the bench against the opposite wall as she processed her opulent surroundings. The bathroom was vacant, but then again, she was here fifteen minutes past ten at night, wanting to arrive early to gain the upper hand over the encounter that was to come… taking into consideration, of course, that she hadn't imagined the vanished letter. It was difficult to be certain when she had no remaining tangible proof of it, not when the owl had delivered it so early before everyone had awoken—before _she_ had awoken, perhaps. 

And the longer Hermione sat there in the empty, silent bathroom, the more it seemed she had imagined receiving it. She felt increasingly foolish, sitting here all alone, waiting for something she was no longer certain had been real from the start.

She was driving herself crazy, her doubts rising like an all-consuming tidal wave inside her head.

Hermione stood up abruptly. She was about to head for the door when she heard it.

An almost inaudible creak.

She went deathly still as the door slid open, and a familiar handsome, dark-haired boy came into view. In the glow of the bathroom, his already pale skin resembled the colour of pure snow.

Hermione willed her paralysed vocal chords to work.

"Riddle," she managed.

He regarded her with polite friendliness. 

"Miss Granger," he said.

Hermione didn't see the point in beating around the bush. She recovered her composure swiftly and folded her arms, her eyes narrowed dangerously into brown slits.

"Just so you know," she said coldly, "I noticed what you did this morning. You thought no one would, didn't you?"

To his credit, his confusion looked perfectly genuine. It was enough for her to falter for a fraction.

"And what," Riddle inquired bemusedly, raising a perfect dark brow, "did you notice?"

"Why were you trying to make Harry look bad in front of everyone?"Hermione said coolly, in a low, hard voice. "What in Merlin's name is wrong with you?"

Those dark eyes widened and went blank for a microsecond before his confusion returned and amplified visibly. 

"I don't understand," he said, very slowly. "What do you mean, I was trying to make him look bad?"

"Don't pretend!" Hermione snapped. "People already think he's dubious enough because of his friendship with Hagrid, and you're only going to make things worse. I know he shouldn't have attacked you, but why didn't you use a Freezing Charm on him like you did the girl—Clarkson—from Ravenclaw yesterday? You let things escalate. You... You wanted people to see him hurting you, didn't you?"

He looked at her for a drawn-out moment, then, very faintly, sighed.

His dark eyes were hooded, she noticed.

"I deserved Harry's anger, Miss Granger," Riddle responded, very softly. "So, how could I retaliate then, when I deserved it?"

Hermione's mouth parted. Whatever she had been expecting, it wasn't this.

"Wh—what?" she gaped.

Had she heard him wrongly?

"It might be difficult for you to believe," he said quietly, "but I'd never truly wanted to confront Rubeus Hagrid that night."

She didn't speak. Rare as it was, words eluded her.

"It doesn't feel good to confront or accuse anyone," he said. "But more and more Muggle-borns were being attacked, and when a Muggle-born girl was actually murdered, I knew I had to step up and do the right thing. I couldn't stand by and watch innocent lives being ripped away—over what? Blood status? I've never understood discrimination like that." 

It was true, Hermione reflected hazily. Unlike his Slytherin friends, Riddle had never exhibited prejudice against Muggle-borns.

If he did, he certainly wouldn't be so pleasant with her.

"I knew that Hagrid had close friends who believed strongly in his innocence," Riddle informed her simply, and her throat clamped up. "I knew they would hate me. But what was I to do? I saw the deadly Acromantula that he kept secretly as a pet—the implications were glaringly obvious. And while I did what I believed was right, it doesn't mean I don't feel remorse for his friends, or for my own actions. I might have ended the attacks, but I also ended your friendship with him."

Hermione's head was spinning at how far she had miscalculated the situation. For some unfathomable reason, she'd had it in her head that Riddle had tried to hurt Harry when in fact, it had been the opposite. Under that smooth, immaculate veil he wore, he had been harbouring feelings of guilt and self-loathing all along. In the pits of her stomach, similar guilt stirred.

Why had she thought the worst of him when he had never been unkind to her, or anyone for the matter?

But...

"Maybe you might feel guilty, but your friends, on the other hand, are absolutely—" Hermione began hotly, but wisely broke off before an uncharacteristic expletive escaped her lips. Riddle smiled faintly at her.

"I know," he said quietly. "But they are and will always be different from most of us. Roots of bigotry and that of a pure-blood lineage run deep, Miss Granger. You of all people should know that."

Hermione bit her lip. Riddle, she was aware, was a half-blood. It had been an unexpected piece of news back in her first year when people had told her about him. Riddle, admired by a group of Slytherin students who were practically pure-blood supremacists themselves, was a half-blood himself?

It was a mystery she was admittedly fascinated by.

Hermione took a deep breath, and ran a hand primly over her robes. 

"You wrote the letter to me this morning," she said. She spoke airily, nonchalantly, not wanting him to know that it was actually a question.

Riddle tilted his raven head slightly, and then—he smiled. She'd never liked to dwell on his looks unlike the majority of the female population in Hogwarts, but she had to admit he was very handsome, the warm smile on his lips only enhancing his magnetism. If she hadn't known of his blood status, she would have easily assumed he hailed from an aristocratic background like his friends.

"I did," he said softly. "I assume you have something to ask me."

Hermione cleared her throat, feeling a little awkward that she was asking for help after her antagonism with him just minutes ago.

"You never clarified about the exception to the bezoar's antidotal properties yesterday," she stated. "You only said venom, but not from a spider. Well, I've done my research today, and the other animals in the animal kingdom that produce venom are scorpions, centipedes, jellyfish, certain cephalopods, certain fish, and reptiles like snakes, frogs and salamanders as well as mammals such as—"

Hermione continued reciting off the list of mammals until she noticed Riddle staring at her, the smile on his face broadening.

"What?" she demanded, irritated, her complexion slightly flushed.

"You have quite the memory, Miss Granger," he murmured, watching her with a distant sort of interest.

"So which animal is it?" Hermione probed exasperatedly. "Tell me already!"

"I thought someone as clever as you would have guessed by now," Riddle said quietly. "It's the emblem of the house I belong in."

Hermione blinked, then she straightened up. "A snake? Are you saying the bezoar can't cure the properties of a snake's venom?"

"Yes."

"I don't…" Hermione frowned. This was bizarre. The remarkable bezoar could cure many poisons all over the world, but not the venom of a snake? "What kind of snake exactly are we talking about, Riddle? I find it hard to believe a snake's venom is the exception. I expected something…" She hesitated.

"Stronger?" Riddle said quietly. "Something more impressive than the emblem of Salazar Slytherin?"

Hermione pursed her lips. She was sick of this endless, century-old debate within the ancient walls of Hogwarts. "I'm not here to debate our house politics with you."

There was a pause, and he acquiesced, "You're right. I'm sorry."

He seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. Instead, he was stepping towards the empty rectangular pool that was clearly a bath, a ringed hand rising gracefully to divest himself of his Slytherin robe as he approached it.

"Wha—what are you doing?" Hermione squeaked, her cheeks pinkening.

He glanced at her, amused. 

"What do you think?" he said, sliding off and dropping his Slytherin robe to the floor with a bored carelessness she had not expected from someone as neat and impeccable as himself. His robes were always ironed flawlessly, without the faintest trace of a wrinkle in sight, and his black hair glossy and sleek. And as she stared at him and at the spotless buttoned white shirt, Oxford blazer and long ebony trousers he wore underneath, Hermione found herself backing away when he smoothly proceeded to slide off his blazer.

"I asked you to come here because I planned to bathe after my rounds, Miss Granger," Riddle said, the corners of his lips quirking as the fabric of the blazer slid in a satiny glide down his broad shoulders and joined the discarded robes on the floor. Although Hermione would never admit it aloud, there was something oddly sensuous and arrogant in the unhurried but unapologetic way he undressed himself. "I was going to answer your query before I went in. I'd like to think I've done my part."

It was undeniably a dismissal.

"But—" Hermione couldn't understand why she was so crestfallen. "Look here, I have many more things to ask you—"

She stopped. Was she going too far? Riddle wasn't her tutor; he wasn't obligated to have her consult him with anything academic. He was from _Slytherin,_ for Merlin's sake. Neither Harry nor Ron even knew she was here, speaking to the boy who had led to Hagrid's expulsion. They would have an aneurysm if they did.

But they didn't know how Riddle felt either—that guilt and remorse currently plagued him, even if he hid it well.

"I'll help you," Riddle said quietly, and she stiffened, turning back to look at him. Thankfully, other than his robe and blazer, he hadn't shed the rest of his uniformed attire, and he studied her from where he stood at the edge of the hollow pool. The light in the bathroom reflected sharply off the black-and-gold signet ring on his slender pale finger, the stone of which he stroked absently.

"I will help you," he repeated softly, "because there is a debt to be paid. For what I did to Hagrid—to Harry—to you, I want more than anything to be relieved of the burden I've been carrying. So if there is anything you'd like to ask, I'll answer it in due time."

Hermione's brown eyes widened, and she sucked in her breath, taken aback. 

"Riddle," she said, feeling more distressed than ever with herself for having misunderstood him the whole day, "I—you don't owe us anything. You did what was right."

Riddle shook his jet black head.

"You should go for now, Miss Granger," he said quietly. "Any other questions can wait another day, I presume? Unless, of course—" The dark eyes gleamed. "You would like to stay and watch me bathe?"

Whatever Hermione had planned to say died in her throat. Embarrassment clogged up in her airways and she indignantly sputtered, " _Absolutely_ not!" before scrambling wildly for the door, her sloppy footsteps making a thunderous racket against the marble floor. 

She could hear soft male laughter behind her, and she promptly slammed the door shut to block the infernal sound out.

What she didn't want to acknowledge, however, was the frisson of heat between her thighs at the curious gleam in his obsidian eyes.

It had seemed almost serpentine.

It electrified every fiber of her being.

She would never, ever admit it, but she knew that when she retired to bed that night, her reluctant hand would dip towards that shameful heat under her blanket.

And throughout it all, the memory of those dark eyes would continue boring into her body, stripping her bare until she was nothing but flesh and bones.

Until there was nowhere for her to hide.

* * *

_Interesting,_ he'd thought later. 

_She saw right through me with that stupid Potter boy. Clever little Mudblood._

_Clever, clever, clever, with her big brown eyes and that untameable mass of curly hair._

_Absolutely not! you say._

_Liar._

_Do not lie to me, for I know…_

_I always know._


	3. Chapter 3

By the time Hermione left the Slytherin dungeons after Potions, she had only ten minutes to spare before her Ancient Runes class started. Panicking, she rushed down the corridor in a mad jumble of books, quills and parchment, only to nearly collide headfirst into Ron and Harry standing outside.

"Blimey, Hermione!" Ron exclaimed, as Harry grabbed her shoulder to steady her, his other hand going to catch her tumbling books. "Watch where you're going!"

"Well, what on earth are the both of you still doing here?" Hermione said crossly, brushing Harry aside once her books were back in place and she had righted herself. "Potions has already long ended."

"Well, Slughorn called you over after class," Ron said. "What did he say?"

Hermione sniffed, readjusting her grip over the stupendous mountain of textbooks nestled within her robed arms. "What do _you_ think?"

Both Ron and Harry stared at her with widened eyes. She thought they looked rather stupid and comical, especially when their jaws slackened at the same time.

"So," Harry said, after some silence. "Slughorn finally invited you to the Slug Club."

"I mean, it's not that surprising, is it?" Hermione responded snootily, tossing her bushy head back. "You do remember I topped our cohort last year, don't you? And my potions have always been the best in the class—"

"Yeah, yeah, we get it, you're the best," Ron muttered. "You can stop tooting your own horn now."

Hermione gave another lofty sniff.

"Now if you don't mind," she declared pointedly, "I'm going to be late for Ancient Runes, so kindly move aside so I can go."

They both parted obediently, letting her through, but not before Ron demanded, "So, when are you going to his Slug Club meeting anyway?"

She could tell from the heated tone of his voice that he was slightly jealous, even though she knew that if she confronted him about it, he would deny it until his very last breath. Her redhead friend had always suffered from an inferiority complex, and she couldn't blame him entirely for it considering that he'd grown up competing with his many siblings. Still, if that was the case, she didn't understand why he just wouldn't work harder. All he did was laze and gripe.

"Tonight," Hermione answered, exchanging a quick guarded look with Harry. It seemed Harry had sensed the faint undercurrent of jealousy in Ron's voice too.

"Well, I hope you're fine still being friends with us," Ron said shortly. "I mean, seeing that we're not from the prestigious Slug Club, and all." He glared at Harry when the latter nudged him. "What?"

"You know what—I really don't have the time for this, Ron," Hermione snapped. "Go vent on someone else. I have a class to attend to."

"You know who else is in the Slug Club, don't you?" Ron shouted after her as she stormed off with as much dignity as she could given that her books were nearly spilling from her arms. "Mr. Perfect Head Boy. Yeah, that's right—the person that got Hagrid expelled! And you're about to join the stupid club he's in with no qualms at all!"

Hermione stopped in her tracks, her knuckles turning bone-white from how hard she was gripping her books. Hit by an unprecedented flare of fury so potent her knees almost buckled, she stood there, struggling to rein her temper in. She had fought with Ron often enough, but never once had she felt this sort of unadulterated rage at him.

"What are you saying, Ron?" Hermione said in a low voice. "That I don't care about Hagrid?"

She saw from the flush in Ron's freckled face that he'd registered the magnitude behind what he'd said, but he was too proud to back down.

"Hermione—" Harry began, but she cut him off.

"Then we might as well all drop out of Hogwarts, Ron," she asserted coolly. "Mr. Perfect Head Boy's the person who got Hagrid expelled, and yet we're all studying at the school he's the Head Boy of. Based on what you accused me of, we ought to _all_ do the right thing, oughtn't we?"

Ron opened his mouth indignantly, trying to retaliate, but it was obvious that he was grappling for something to counter with.

"That's what I thought," Hermione said contemptuously, and she turned back on her heel. It seemed, however, that Ron was determined not to let her have the parting shot, for a second later, he yelled after her, "Seems like you're siding with him a little too much, don't you think?"

Hermione slowed in her tracks again. Inadvertently, she thought of what the Head Boy had admitted to her a few nights before. It had been a rare spark of vulnerability she had not expected from the polished, sophisticated air he always carried with him.

He had confessed to harbouring guilt over Hagrid's expulsion. In that moment, Hermione had placed herself in his shoes, and she'd realised then that things weren't so simply black and white. As hard as it was to contemplate, what would she have done if she was Riddle? Which choice would have required prioritising—her friendship with Hagrid, or the safety of Muggle-borns at Hogwarts?

It was a question she couldn't answer.

She had been tempted to fill Ron and Harry in about the unexpected confession of guilt she'd received, but she knew instinctively that they would never accept it. They were too angry, too hurt and betrayed, to ever sympathise.

They believed far too strongly in Hagrid's innocence for that.

As for Hermione…

But what other alternative could there be? she wondered numbly. If the perpetrator behind the attacks wasn't the Acromantula Hagrid had kept as a pet, then who—or rather, what—could have attacked the Muggle-born students? All the students had been searched, and no one had owned a pet anywhere as dangerous as Hagrid's.

And there was also the indubitable fact, of course, that following Hagrid's arrest, there had not been a single attack.

Peace had been restored—or at least, an unstable, tenuous mimicry of it.

But now, she could feel even that tenuous mimicry start to fall apart as she walked away in silence from Ron and Harry, her books cradled to her chest. She didn't look back; didn't respond.

She just kept walking.

* * *

Hermione didn't know what she was supposed to wear to the Slug Club meeting, and she'd eventually decided after classes had ended to remain in her school robes as per normal. While the other Gryffindors headed for dinner at the Great Hall, she departed the common room all alone that evening for Slughorn's office, acutely aware that Ron was still not speaking to her—and had not spoken to her throughout the rest of their lessons today.

What else was new?

"Hermione?"

Having just crawled out of the portrait hole, Hermione nearly fell flat on her face at the sudden voice that came behind her. She spun around after regaining her footing and, to her great surprise, spotted Harry standing by himself, his green eyes uncertain behind his round glasses.

"Harry?" Hermione was puzzled, yet slightly on her guard. "Why aren't you off for dinner?"

"I—right." Harry shuffled his feet. "Yeah, in a minute. I just wanted to talk to you about, um, earlier. About Ron."

She felt her wariness intensify, and she couldn't help the sharpening in her voice as she said, tersely, "What about him?"

"He definitely went overboard today," Harry said rapidly. "I don't deny that. I'm really sorry, Hermione."

"You don't have to apologise," Hermione retorted, though a part of her did feel sorry that Harry had to constantly put up with her never-ending spats with Ron. "He's the one who should be doing the apologising, not you."

"Yeah, definitely," Harry said, a tad awkwardly. "But you know how he is. He feels inferior sometimes. It's hard when Charlie, Bill and Percy are all so—"

"I know he's had to live in their shadow for a long time," Hermione interrupted. "But we all have our own struggles, Harry. You have yours, I have mine, and he has his. It's not fair to take it out on anyone."

"Right," Harry said, running a hand through his messy black hair. "Definitely. I get it, and I—I'll make sure he apologises."

Hermione turned up her nose. "If he doesn't want to, he doesn't have to," she answered brusquely. "Look, I have to go, Harry. The meeting's about to start. I'll talk to you later, all right?"

"Right," Harry said. He paused, the uncertainty in his emerald eyes deepening, and then, as if he couldn't hold it back anymore, blurted, "Is it true, though?"

Hermione's forehead crimped. "Is what true?"

"Do you side with Riddle, even a little?" he asked. There was a suffocating second, and he exhaled a shallow, shaky breath. "You know what—never mind. I shouldn't have asked. I'm not trying to start a fight, I just—" He petered off into silence, his breathing laboured, but Hermione knew that unlike Ron, it wasn't an accusation on his part.

It was a fear.

Hermione didn't answer him right away. She stood there, mentally navigating through the myriad of toxic emotions and conflicting thoughts in her head, searching for the answer—an answer she didn't quite know herself, not until she came up with something like it a few nanoseconds later.

She still didn't have a concrete answer, but she did, on the other hand, finally realise how she felt.

"I'm just angry," she said at last, and Harry sucked in his breath. "I'm angry and frustrated that Muggle-borns are being discriminated against, attacked, and killed. I'm angry that all you two care about is finding justice for Hagrid, and not about finding justice for the Muggle-borns—people like me—that were attacked. That someone actually _died_ last year for something as stupid as blood status." She felt the hot sting of tears in her eyes. "It's frustrating to me that everything is about picking sides when our biggest enemy should be the hate for something I can't help being."

She didn't look at Harry. She couldn't. Instead, she pivoted around and stalked down the corridor, leaving him behind to stand there in shattering silence. The remnants of their conversation continued to ring like bells in her head as she ventured up the staircase.

Before long, she arrived at the sixth floor of the castle and, after taking a deep breath and forcing herself to shake off the earlier conversation with Harry, knocked tentatively on Slughorn's office door. She didn't know what she had been expecting, but when the door opened—presumably manipulated by Slughorn's wand—and she stepped in, Hermione knew that what she saw wasn't it.

Numerous heads turned to face her from inside the study, and almost at once the astringent taste of bile climbed in the back of her throat.

The sight of a round dinner table occupied mostly by the familiar cruel faces of Slytherins instantly made her heart plummet, and her skin sweat. There were only a smattering of faces that she recognised from other houses, including Deborah Simmons from Ravenclaw and another prefect in Hermione's year who was from Hufflepuff.

 _Of course_ a good majority of the Slug Club were Slytherins. Slughorn was the Head of Slytherin House, and he was notorious for his blatant favoritism, which he would never admit to even if it was painfully obvious. There was also the fact, of course, that most of, if not all, the Slytherins were reverent followers of the Slug Club's biggest star, and it was natural that Slughorn was more biased towards the friends of his favourite star.

And she saw said star then, sitting directly perpendicular to Slughorn, who was at the head of the table.

Dark-haired, pale and handsome, with his fair hollowed cheeks and bottomless dark eyes, Tom Riddle's features were measured and calm as he, like everyone else present, turned their heads and gazed at her. As usual, his placid mien stood out in contrast to the nasty, belligerent sneers forming on the other Slytherins' faces at the sight of Hermione Granger—a Gryffindor _and_ a Muggle-born.

To the Slytherins, the latter was a far, far more unforgivable crime than the former.

"Ah, Miss Granger!" Slughorn's ruddy face brightened, and he clapped his beefy hands together. She saw that his pudgy fingers were coated with something white, and the reason why soon manifested itself when she spotted the opened box of crystallised pineapple before him. "Welcome, welcome! Please have a seat, we've saved one for you!"

"I apologise if I'm late. I thought you told me the meeting started at seven, Professor," Hermione said, approaching the lavish table warily. Whether it had been built that way, or because he had used magical trickery to make it so, Slughorn's office was much larger than the usual teacher's study. The office encompassed a fireplace with two large sofas surrounding it as well as the round dinner table, which was enormous enough to seat the ten students in the Slug Club. Plates of fragrant food lay on the table, consisting of roast, fish pie, mashed potatoes and runner beans with onions and tomatoes.

"Well, yes, indeed I did," Slughorn said jovially as she sat on the only empty seat, which was at the end of the table and next to the prefect from Hufflepuff whose name she could not recall. He greeted her with a smile, which she reciprocated. "But I did inform the others to come a little earlier so I could formally announce that you would be joining us today, Miss Granger, along with Mr. Macmillan. As you all know—"

He redirected his radiant beam to the other students around the table. "Miss Granger has performed at the top of her cohort for the past four years, with Mr. Macmillan in second place—" That, Hermione thought, must be the Hufflepuff prefect. "—which is hardly surprising, considering that these two fifth-years have produced the finest potions in all my fifth-year classes. So come, everyone—let us welcome them both to our humble abode today!"

He picked up a spoon by his empty plate and tapped it animatedly against his goblet. There was a pregnant pause, and then, at the same time, both Deborah Simmons and Tom Riddle lifted their goblets. The other Slytherins hesitated, but they eventually closed their fingers stiffly around their goblets and slowly raised the cups, the sneers on their faces never wavering.

"Welcome, Miss Granger, Mr. Macmillan," Riddle said quietly. His impenetrable ebony eyes glanced at the Hufflepuff prefect, and then slid slowly towards her. She found herself going stock-still, unable to tear her brown eyes away from those hypnotic dark abysses.

"Welcome," Deborah repeated kindly, the other Slytherins repeating the same greeting a beat later, and Hermione had to marvel at how much cold malice the Slytherins could pack into a single word. She recognised a Slytherin girl seated directly opposite her—if Hermione was not wrong, she hailed from the famous House of Black—who was sneering particularly venomously at her, lips curled in undisguised loathing.

Slughorn was oblivious to most of the Slytherins' antagonism, however.

"Well, now, let's get to know both of you better," he said, beaming at Hermione and Macmillan. "Macmillan, that name is familiar—now where have I…?"

"My parents work in the Ministry of Magic, Professor," Macmillan said. "In the Department of International Magical Cooperation."

Slughorn's plump face lit up like a candle behind his gingery blond moustache.

"Ah, yes, but of course!" he exclaimed, sounding delighted. "The Macmillan family—one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, correct?" The Sacred Twenty-Eight, Hermione knew, were the twenty-eight British families that were still truly pure-blood. They also, of course, included the ancient House of Black. "Marvellous, marvellous... I knew I thought you were familiar when I saw you, my boy—what can I say, I know my people! And you're second in your cohort, and a prefect, too… Your parents must be so very proud, so very proud indeed..."

Macmillan's chest, which had his prefect badge pinned to it, puffed up. "They are, Professor," he proclaimed, with a touch of self-importance.

"As they should be, naturally," Slughorn said approvingly. He refocused on Hermione. "And you, Miss Granger? What do your parents do?"

"Well," Hermione said, ignoring the pronounced sneers on most of the Slytherins, "my parents are—" She gave a prim cough. "They're dentists."

There was a silence, which was promptly broken by several loud snickers. The girl from the House of Black ended up bursting into raucous laughter, and Hermione had to resist the urge to hex her.

Slughorn looked bewildered and almost crushed for a moment, before he said, "Oh, yes… Muggles, I assume? I'm sure that in the Muggle community, they're very valued, very valued indeed…" He dipped his fat fingers absently into his box of crystallised pineapple. "But, with your talent, Miss Granger, I must strongly profess that, er—dentistry would be quite wasted on you. If anything, I believe that we need fine talents like you in the Ministry, my dear." He stuffed the pineapple in his mouth. "Would that career path interest you at all?"

"In the _Ministry_?" the Black girl sneered. The disdain on her face more than indicated her feelings on the matter—on having a Muggle-born join the ranks of their government. "Professor Slughorn, surely you can't be—"

"Oh, yes," Hermione put in brazenly, cutting her off. "My goal in the future, Professor Slughorn, is to become the next Minister of Magic."

There was another silence this time, but Hermione could tell this silence was different. It was no longer borne from condescension, but of utter shock. Even the Black girl was rendered speechless, but before Hermione could shoot her a smirk, she felt the disconcerting sensation of dark eyes settling upon her, boring into her flesh. 

Stiffening, the brunette turned her head a little, and saw Tom Riddle watching her wordlessly from his seat with what appeared to be vague interest, his chin resting on his steepled hands. She thought she saw those dark smothering irises gleam, but when she turned her head again to take a closer look, the gleam was gone, leaving those irises so black that she couldn't even find his pupils.

The only thing gleaming was the signet ring on his finger, and a slightly unsettled Hermione surmised that was what she must've seen earlier.

"My goodness, Miss Granger," Slughorn said at last, once he'd recovered from his own shock. "That's quite a hefty ambition… but yes, I can certainly respect that—and needless to say, definitely not impossible for a witch of your talent—"

"Professor," Lucius Malfoy interpolated silkily. "I don't mean to be impolite, but I must say that you've always insisted that Tom pursue the position."

Slughorn nodded appreciatively, his eyes sparkling at once.

"Yes, most definitely," he acknowledged, and his voice rose in volume with fervour. "Tom, my boy, I've said it before, and I'll say it again no matter how much you claim otherwise—this is something you must consider pursuing! With your brilliance, your magical ability—you being the finest student in history since Professor Dumbledore himself—not to mention your leadership skills and your charisma, it would be a waste, an utter waste, if you choose to pursue anything less. And with my connections, trust me, that position would be yours in fifteen years, give or take—"

Hermione's hands fisted under the table. She couldn't help the surge of annoyance at how swiftly Slughorn had forgotten her the instant Tom had been mentioned.

She would show them, she vowed. She would break the records he had set in Hogwarts. While she could not achieve twelve Outstanding O.W.L.s like he had since she had dropped Divination and Muggle Studies, she would have to obtain an Outstanding for all of her remaining ten subjects. She would slave away in the library all year if that was what it took.

"You flatter me, sir," Tom said quietly, unaffected by the utmost reverence the other Slytherins watched him with, the girl from the Black House simpering at him from the other end of the table with unbridled admiration.

Struck by a hot rush of overwhelming indignation, Hermione burst out loud before she could stop herself.

"Then I suppose," she announced impetuously, "that it's going to be a competition between you and me, Mr. Riddle."

Another stunned hush fell with several jaws dropping, including Macmillan's. Even Deborah Simmons looked astounded, whilst Lucius Malfoy's face was turning a rather unpleasant shade of blotchy red. Hermione knew that had Slughorn not been present, he would have probably uttered something quite derogatory to her and hexed her by now.

Then the girl from the House of Black burst into peals of high-pitched, deranged laughter so suddenly that Hermione jumped in her chair.

She was not the only one who was taken aback; Macmillan's goblet nearly fell from his hand and spilled his pumpkin juice in the process.

" _You_ , compete against Tom?" the Slytherin girl cackled away, laughing harder, her head thrown back so that her long raven tresses flowed down her shoulders. "Who do you think you are? Why, because you can study, because you can read a book, because you're number one in _your_ cohort? So what? Do you think your scores even come _close_? How far do you think reading's going to take you? By the end of the day, you're nothing but a filthy little Mu—"

The rest of the obvious slur she'd been about to say was replaced by a shrill shriek that tore without warning from her throat. To Hermione's confusion and stupefaction, the other girl's whole body suddenly jerked against the chair she was sitting on, her head bouncing backward so violently she must've had whiplash. When her head careened forward to face Hermione again, it was to audible stricken gasps in the room.

The Slytherin girl's face was covered in boils.

There was a heart-stopping moment where time seemed to stand still altogether, before the black-haired girl's disfigured features twisted further in undiluted rage.

" _You!_ " she howled, jabbing a finger at Hermione. "You did this to me!"

"What?" Hermione was taken off-guard. "No, I didn't—"

"You did!" the girl screamed. "How dare you! How _dare_ you!"

She tried to reach for her wand, but Malfoy, who was sitting beside her, gripped her arm in warning.

Professor Slughorn had lurched to his feet with some effort considering his protruding belly, and he attempted to defuse the situation.

"All right, that's enough!" he cried. "Someone please help Bellatrix to the Hospital Wing—" As he spoke, Malfoy rose promptly from his chair, still clutching the arm of the livid Slytherin girl. "And as for you, Miss Granger—"

Hermione got to her feet, her shoulders squared with mounting aggravation.

"I didn't do it, Professor," she said fiercely. "I swear that I didn't. I really didn't. I didn't even take out my wand!"

"Surely you can't believe her, Professor," Lestrange spoke up scathingly. "Bella was confronting Granger, and the next thing we know, she was hexed. Everything points to the obvious."

"For the last time, I didn't do it!" Hermione shrilled. "I haven't even learnt nonverball spells yet, and I won't until my sixth year!"

Not that she would admit, of course, that she had been practising them on her own.

But she truly wasn't lying; she hadn't hexed Bellatrix Black, even though she had been sorely tempted to. But if she had not done it, then who had? There was no way Bellatrix's fellow Slytherins would have hexed her, and both Riddle and Deborah Simmons were seated all the way on the other end of the table by Slughorn, whilst Bellatrix sat opposite Hermione at the opposing end.

It would have been a tremendous magical feat for a wizard or witch to accurately direct a nonverbal spell at a specific target seated so far away from them, especially with other seated students blocking the way. And Slughorn had been seated at the head of the table with Riddle and Simmons on either side of him, which would make any such attempts on Riddle or Simmons' part foolhardy and dangerous.

To pull that off successfully whilst remaining completely undetected by even the professor would have required an insane degree of magical control and ability, the kind that only a genius would—

Hermione froze.

No.

There was no way _he_ had done it. It was unthinkable and the motive inexplicable. She simply couldn't comprehend the logic behind it, and with that in mind, she instantly dismissed the errant suspicion.

"Well, you _are_ at the top of your cohort," Lestrange rebutted scornfully, pinning Hermione with a caustic, scorching look. "Do you expect us to believe that a nonverbal Hex is completely beyond your ability, Granger?"

Hermione glared furiously at him. The more she thought about it, the less inconceivable it seemed for a Slytherin to have hexed Bellatrix. They would definitely not have minded turning on their own if it meant framing Hermione in front of Slughorn, though she genuinely hadn't expected them to possess the brains for that. Even now she could hear Bellatrix uttering stifled curses at her as Malfoy led her out of Slughorn's office.

" _Y_ _ou little fool."_ Hermione, positioned closest to the departing Slytherins from where she sat at the foot of the table, heard Malfoy hiss under his breath to Bellatrix. " _Saying that in front of the prof—_ "

And then she heard no more as the office door drew closed.

Her head spun. The biggest question now was: _who had done it?_

The Potions Master stood at the head of the table, looking torn and conflicted. His walrus moustache wobbled as his eyes darted from Hermione to Lestrange, and then to the empty seat Bellatrix had vacated just minutes ago. Macmillan had gone rigid in his chair, his eyes as wide as saucers, while the Slytherins sat and waited with visible anticipation for Slughorn's verdict.

"Professor."

Hermione went stock-still at the unruffled sound of Riddle's quiet, cultured voice. The dark-haired boy's gaze was resting sedately on Slughorn.

"As Head Boy, Miss Granger is one of my prefects," he said. "May I suggest—and I apologise for any impertinence on my part by suggesting so—that I speak to her privately and get to the bottom of the matter myself? Of course, I'll be sure to report to you accordingly by then, Professor."

To say Slughorn looked relieved would have been an understatement.

"Ah, yes, yes," he said at once. "That's a very good idea, Tom. Yes, let's do that. As always, I'll be counting on you, my boy—" He clapped Riddle on the shoulder. "Now, if only the students in Hogwarts were half as conscientious and responsible as you." He sighed. "If only…"

"Not at all, sir," Tom said quietly, rising from his seat in a fluid, graceful motion. "I'm more than happy to do my part if it means restoring any semblance of peace."

Hermione thought she saw the other Slytherins smirk, but this time, she had an inkling that their smirks weren't directed at her. Her suspicions and confoundment grew. What, then, was the reason for their mirth?

Whatever it was, she didn't have time to think about it, not when she was jolted out of her thoughts by Riddle's noiseless approach, the hem of his emerald-lapelled Slytherin robes rippling behind him.

As she stood rooted to the spot and stared at him, entranced despite herself, he held out an elegant long-fingered hand to her, the one with the gleaming gold-and-black signet ring on it.

"Come, Miss Granger," Riddle said softly.

The onyx chasms of his eyes bored into her large brown ones, ensnaring her in their bottomless depths as they had in past rendezvouses, and it took her a fraction before she registered that he had spoken once more, just as softly as before.

"Let's take a walk together, shall we?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who was kind enough to leave comments/Kudos the past two chapters. I really appreciate it! x


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I strongly recommend rereading earlier chapters (if you don't remember them clearly) for a more cohesive read. x

Inside the abandoned girls' lavatory on the second floor, the candlelight dimly illuminated two figures standing together. The dark, flickering amber glow cast shadows across Malfoy's blond head as he held his wand towards his companion's disfigured face and murmured an incantation under his breath.

Bellatrix's chest heaved, tears leaking down her cheeks. The blond male continued with the Hex-Breaker incantation, all the while watching as the hideous boils on her skin slowly started to recede from his magic.

"I don't understand," she sobbed. "You must be wrong, Lucius, you must be. He wouldn't do this to me—he _wouldn't_ —"

Malfoy ignored her, still busy uttering the incantation in a low voice.

"It was the Mudblood who did this to me, it had to be her," Bellatrix insisted, her rancorous voice rising in pitch and her sorrow morphing into a murderous aggression. "You should be ashamed of yourself, Lucius, for claiming it was the Dark Lor—"

" _Quiet_!" Malfoy's incantation broke off, and he raised his wand, skewering her with an incredulous stare. "Do you want to lose that head of yours, you fool? We are not in the Slytherin common room, so hold your tongue and watch what you say here!"

Bellatrix glared at him spitefully, but even she seemed to realise that she had crossed a line, for she kept her mouth shut.

Not for the first time he despaired at the utter lack of brains she possessed. Her slip when she'd called Hermione Granger a Mudblood in front of Slughorn had been bad enough, and now this? If anyone had heard the last few words that had escaped her lips, and if their leader found out about her carelessness, Heaven forbid…

The both of them would pay dearly for it.

"I'll kill her," Bellatrix hissed. "I'll kill the Mudblood for what she did to me…"

"For what _he_ did to you, you mean," Malfoy said silkily. "That's why you're a fool, Bella. You can't even identify his machinations, and yet you consider yourself his most devoted follower?"

"You lie!" Bellatrix tried to spit in his face. "You lie, Lucius!"

"What would I gain from lying?" Lucius sneered. "Think, Bella—why on earth would I want to defend that filthy Mudblood to you?"

Bellatrix's chest heaved again, and tears began to bubble on her lashes. Her hand rose to clutch at the remaining boils on her disfigured face.

"He wouldn't do this to me," she moaned in agony. "He wouldn't hurt me like this—there's no reason…"

"No reason?" Lucius sneered. "There's always a reason for what he does. Haven't you realised that by now? It's obviously something to do with that Mudblood."

"What about her?" Bellatrix shrieked hysterically. With her long inky hair in disarray and her skin marred by angry-looking boils, she looked like a madwoman. "I fucking hate her! I don't understand why—"

"I see you have yet to gain his confidence," Lucius noted with some satisfaction. "Which, I have to say, is hardly surprising, considering your nitwittedness—"

"Tell me!" Bellatrix screeched. Her claw-like hands whipped out and gripped the front of Lucius' robes, nearly skewing the shiny prefect badge pinned on the fabric. "Tell me about the Mudblood, Lucius! What does he want with her?"

Lucius pried her hands off him.

"She's been asking questions," he said disparagingly. "She asked him several nights ago what the exception to the bezoar's antidotal properties was."

"That…" Bellatrix processed his words for a second, then, despite the still-wet tears streaking her face, abruptly threw back her raven head and launched into peals of uninhibited, cackling laughter. Her glee echoed cacophonously around the walls of the abandoned toilet. "That stupid witch! If only she knew… If only she knew!"

"It might all be very funny to you, Bella," Lucius said coldly, "but have you considered the ramifications if she knew the truth?"

"What about it?" Bellatrix scorned. "Let that Mudblood find out—let her find out that the exception is the venom of the very monster last year that—"

" _Silencio!_ "

Lucius swiped his wand in a jerky motion, and the girl's strident voice suddenly vanished. Her face contorted in a disbelieving rage as she tried to scream again to no avail. If looks could kill—and ironically enough, Lucius knew of a monstrous creature that could do just that—he would have been long dead on his feet now.

"Be silent, Bella, and listen to me," Lucius hissed, his agitated voice pitched so low that it was reduced to an aggrieved whisper. "Don't you see that this Mudblood is intelligent? As hard as it is to believe, she's got brains, and we would be foolish to underestimate her. She's also an insufferable know-it-all who won't stop until she finds out everything."

He paused, breathing hard.

"Assume that she seeks the answer to that question, and consults one of the professors. Even worse, what if she consults that old fool Dumbledore, and he tells her the answer? That's going to open up a whole can of worms in their minds, isn't it? After all, the myth of that—" They had been instructed never to say the word ' _Basilisk_ ' outside the Slytherin Dungeon, and he continued, "—creature isn't unknown to the wizarding community, and should Granger begin research, it's possible she or Dumbledore might start to connect the dots. That means, Bella, that they might suspect that there was— _is_ —one residing in Hogwarts judging by the dead roosters and the Mudbloods that were Petrified last year. Granger never believed it was that half-giant oaf to start with, and she'd be seeking alternate answers."

Bellatrix was still struggling to speak against what remained of his Silencing Charm, but he went on, ignoring her rabid attempts.

"What do you think will happen then? If there is so much as a possibility that there is something like that in Hogwarts—that it had been set free before, and is still on the loose now—then investigations will open up once more. The school cannot operate so long as an unapprehended monster lives within. Hogwarts will be shut down. They won't take any chances this time, not after what happened last year."

He knew by now that the Silencing Charm must have abated (it was notoriously difficult to cast a long-lasting one on another human being) but for once, Bellatrix was voluntarily silent.

They both knew that their leader would never allow Hogwarts to shut down. It was the primary reason he had ceased the attacks last year and framed Hagrid for it.

"Kill her," Bellatrix said suddenly. A vicious, malevolent note had entered her voice, though to her credit, she kept her volume as low as his. "Kill the Mudblood. In fact, I'll do it myself."

"You really are nothing but a total imbecile," Lucius sneered. "Kill her, and have another Mudblood dead after the Mudblood attacks last year? Yes, that's most certainly going to keep Hogwarts open and running, isn't it?"

She fumed at him. "If you have better ideas—"

"He's taking care of it," Lucius broke in, and even without elaborating they both knew who _he_ was.

"How?" Bellatrix demanded.

"First of all, he has to divert her attention away from the professors, especially Dumbledore, and onto him," Lucius said. "And you know that isn't at all difficult for him."

Commanding attention—ensnaring prey into his sticky web of deceit—was an ability that their leader had mastered flawlessly. Lucius had a feeling, though, that it was an innate ability that came naturally for the Head Boy, one that hadn't required his mastering at all. The blond's memories stirred until he was standing back in the Slytherin dormitory at early dawn several days ago.

_"My Lord?"_

_He was confused, watching the envelope float in spirals above his tall, slender companion's lazily lifted wand—the envelope containing the letter to Hermione Granger._

_He surmised the other male was casting a charm or spell of some sort on the envelope, but it was hard to tell because his master favoured performing nonverbal magic. It was extraordinary, the kind of seamless and effortless sorcery he could perform without speaking the incantation whatsoever. Never mind the other seventh-years; Lucius was certain that most of the professors besides Dumbledore could not perform nonverbal magic to this level either._

_"My Lord," Lucius said again. "May I know what charm—?"_

_He was interrupted by a flurry of feathers as the owl made its arrival at the window of the dormitory. It waited patiently as the Head Boy languidly flicked his wand and the envelope glissaded towards the bird. Obediently it seized the envelope encasing the letter before taking off again into the pink sunrise._

_"It'll burn and disappear," the Head Boy said, startling Lucius, "when she reads it."_

_Lucius' puzzlement grew, but he concealed it and schooled his features into a blasé mask._

_"... I see," he said, even though he didn't quite understand. Was the charm his master had cast on the letter truly that necessary? Surely the contents weren't that incriminating?_

_He was acutely aware of his master observing the false blasé mask he wore, and ever-so slowly, the corners of his master's pale sculpted lips rose._

_Without any warning whatsoever, a book on Lucius' nightstand burst into flames._

_Lucius yelped and swung around in horror. He tried to reach for his burning book on the nightstand, but then, much to his disbelief and bewilderment, a grey discharge of acrid smoke burst forth, engulfing the book in its entirety. Not long later the smoke dissipated to reveal an empty space where the book was._

_Lucius stared dumbly at the scorch mark on the empty mahogany nightstand, and turned his blond head feebly at his companion._

_"My—My Lord?" he croaked, his grey eyes meeting bottomless dark ones._

_"Why the consternation, Lucius?" the Head Boy said softly. "I thought you finished that novel last night. You said that you planned to find something else to read."_

_"I…" Lucius' mouth was dry. "Indeed, that is what I planned…"_

_"Are you still going to find something else to read?" the Head Boy inquired lazily. "Or is your first impulse to retrieve your lost book?"_

_"No—no—I..." Lucius quailed, knowing the other male has read right through his hollow denial._

_His companion leaned forward, his beautifully sculpted lips widening into a mocking smile. It wasn't anything like the friendly, urbane smile he habitually wore outside the Slytherin Dungeons—it was cunning and shrewd, with a hint of cold cruelty in it._

_"It's human nature to crave what we lose," he said softly. "We frequently pursue what we've lost before anything else—that often means putting on hold whatever other initial plans we've made. Don't you think so, Lucius?"_

_Lucius drew in a stilted breath._

_"I—I suppose," he stuttered. "Yes…"_

_"Good," the Head Boy said. "I'm glad you comprehend."_

_And then, faint while it was, comprehension did begin to dawn through the fog in Lucius' head. Inadvertently, he thought of Hermione Granger, of how she would react once the letter disappeared into flames in her hands._

_How would she respond, he pondered, to losing something the instant she'd gotten it?_

_She would, of course, have originally planned to consult the professors with her academic problem. It was the most conceivable solution from her perspective._

_But with the vanishing letter she would receive, with it slipping from her grasp…_

_Lucius stared hard at the Head Boy, but the latter was no longer looking at him. Absently, he stroked the gold-and-black signet ring he wore on his finger as his obsidian gaze slid languorously to the other Knights stationed mutely inside the room._

_"Rodolphus," he said. "I have a small task for you when we enter the Great Hall later for breakfast. Do you think you'll be up for it?"_

_Lestrange perked up, looking ecstatic to be chosen, and Lucius had to suppress a stab of annoyance._

_"Yes, yes, of course," Lestrange replied eagerly. "What should I do? Is it about the Mudblood?"_

_"It's about her good friend," Tom Riddle said, smiling, "Harry Potter…"_

"Lucius!"

Snapped out of his memories, Lucius found himself meeting Bellatrix's ireful black eyes. The unpleasant sight of her bared teeth and her still-deformed face twisted with acrimony was enough to ground him back to reality.

"Are you listening to me?" she hissed ferociously. "I'm asking you specifically how he plans to stop the Mudblood."

"And how would I know?" Lucius said icily. "Do I look like I can read his mind, Bella?"

"You know enough—"

"All I know is the bottom line," Lucius cut in curtly. "I don't know how he plans to do it, but he will have to place the Mudblood under his control."

"Under his control? But how does he plan to control her when we can't perform any Unforgivable—"

"Yes, which means there has to be another way to control her, something we haven't thought of," he said grimly.

"Do you think…" Bellatrix paused. "Do you think _he_ has an idea how…?"

A glacial, callous smirk gradually formed on Lucius' mouth, and he spoke again in a rather cruel voice that matched his smirk.

"What do you think, Bella?"

* * *

It was to great relief when Slughorn's office door closed behind her and she stepped out into the cooler, fresh air that permeated the corridors of the castle. Now that there were no longer any pairs of eyes boring accusingly into the back of her skull, Hermione stood there, gulping in heavy intakes of the chilly, reinvigorating air as she tried to compose herself.

It took everything she had to work through her boiling anger and not run back in to hex everyone in sight. She was practically seething from the injustice of it all; if there was one thing she hated, it was being maligned. This was supposed to be her debut at the Slug Club, and the meeting had gone completely south for her. She wondered if she would be accepted back again, even though she didn't truly want to go back at all.

She didn't have anything against Macmillan, of course, but it was horribly unfair that out of the two newcomers today she had been the one who'd been targeted and set up by the Slytherins. What if, Heaven forbid, she got her prefect badge revoked because of this?

Her blood ran cold.

A rustle of movement startled her out of her reverie, and the girl jumped as she registered Riddle's presence beside her. In the darkness of the corridor, his black robes blended all too well with their surroundings, and his noiselessness up to this point had only obscured him further.

"Miss Granger," he said. "Come with me."

Not knowing what else to do, Hermione followed him numbly down the deserted corridor, their footfalls echoing lightly around them. The silence continued to grow and grow between them until it became too oppressive for her to bear.

"I didn't do it!" Hermione blurted emphatically, balling her fists. "I didn't, Riddle. I didn't touch a hair on Bellatrix Black's head—please believe me when I say that!"

The Head Boy slowed in his tracks, then turned his raven head around to gaze wordlessly at her. What little she could see of his handsome, aristocratic face was illuminated by the fire torches on the stone walls, and the flickering tangerine light played long shadows across the pale porcelain sheen of his skin. His eyes remained fully hidden by the swathe of the shadows, though she was sure that even if she could see them, they would give nothing of what he was thinking away either.

Yet when he spoke, however, she detected nothing accusatory or steely in his quiet voice. Rather, she actually thought she detected a note of sympathy.

"I want to believe you, Miss Granger," he said. "But even if I don't, it doesn't matter."

Hermione blinked, taken aback.

"What do you mean?" she demanded.

"Truthfully, I didn't call you here to test you," he said simply. "Whether or not you hexed her, I don't plan to take action."

If she had been surprised before, she was gobsmacked now. "Wait… You don't?"

Riddle canted his head to the side then, revealing those unreadable midnight eyes from behind the shadows, and despite herself, Hermione's breath caught. It was mesmerising, seeing the miniature dainty shadows his sooty lashes cast on his pale hollowed cheeks.

"What Bellatrix was about to call you was unforgivable," he said, and her pulse spiked at the memory of the slur that had been cut off from the Slytherin girl's mouth when she'd been hexed.

_Mudblood._

"That is not the kind of language I tolerate in my house," he continued calmly. "And while that doesn't mean I condone retaliatory behaviour, it means I'm going to turn a blind eye just this once as an apology to you, Miss Granger."

For a moment, Hermione couldn't speak. She stood there, warring with an entire spectrum of conflicting emotions brought on by his words. One side of her wanted to protest and yell that she wasn't the culprit, that she had done nothing wrong that required turning a blind eye to, while another side of her wondered how it was possible that Riddle could be so damned different from his fellow degenerate Slytherins.

"She should be the one to apologise," Hermione gritted out at last, her voice tart. "Not you."

Riddle considered her words for a fraction.

"Yes," he acquiesced. "You're right. I'll speak to Bella and make sure she apologises to you as well."

Hermione swallowed. "There is no 'as well'," she stated stiffly. "You don't have to apologise on her behalf."

"She is from my house, and as Head Boy, the student body is to an extent my responsibility," Riddle said quietly. "I try to do what I can, but I'm aware it's not enough."

"That's not…" Hermione sighed exasperatedly, brushing a thick brown curly lock of hair from her forehead. "It's not your fault, so enough with the martyr act, Riddle."

Those liquid dark eyes followed the motion of her hand brushing the stray curl of hair, and she almost froze. He didn't say anything for the next few milliseconds, his heavy gaze on her hair. She wondered dazedly if she was imagining the lidded quality of his onyx eyes, but then he looked back at her, and it was gone.

When he spoke again, it was with some amusement.

"I'll report to Professor Slughorn that you've convinced me of your innocence," he said. "You can go now."

Hermione bit her lip. She didn't exactly know why, but she couldn't bring herself to leave. Not like that.

Ron and Harry were wrong, she thought. All this while they had let the company Riddle surrounded himself with taint their perception of him. It was easy to point fingers, to blame him for Hagrid's expulsion from a superficial angle.

Yet the more Hermione got to know him, the more she saw herself in him. Like her, he was an ordinary student hailing from a Muggle background who studied extraordinarily hard in a magical school, and who took his responsibilities seriously and followed the rules as much as he could.

It didn't mean he lacked a conscience—he'd felt so guilty for Hagrid's expulsion that he'd been exceedingly nice to Hermione, whom he knew was Hagrid's friend, and had offered to help her with anything academic when he had no obligation to do so. He'd also apologised on Bellatrix Black's behalf and decided to excuse the mishap today, which was not something she'd expected from him at all.

"Riddle," she said, astounding even herself with what she said next. "I really, genuinely did not hex Bellatrix Black. Could you believe me when I say that?"

Those charcoal eyes widened slightly, and nearly a full minute passed before Riddle answered her.

"... I don't know," he responded, very slowly. "I don't know you well enough to give you a definite answer, Miss Granger. I'm sorry."

A wave of overwhelming disappointment hit her, but she knew that what he'd said made sense. Making sure not to let her dismay show on her face, she sniffed a little and spun away, her bushy head held high.

"You don't have to apologise, Riddle," Hermione said primly, inwardly regretting that she'd even allowed herself to care. "You're quite right. We don't really know each other, do we?" She cleared her throat, determined not to show how awkwardly stung she felt. "Anyway, I'll take my leave now. Thank you for your assistance today, regardless."

She'd taken a couple of steps away when she heard his deep, velvety voice.

"I do know," he said quietly, "that you aim to excel and to break the school records here. Isn't that so?"

 _Break_ my _records,_ were the unspoken words _._

Hermione halted.

"Yes," she affirmed, a touch breathlessly. "Yes, you're not wrong."

She'd made her ambitions quite clear during the Slug Club meeting, hadn't she?

"Shall I tell you a secret, then?"

Hermione stiffened, then pivoted around to eyeball him. "Secret?" she demanded.

The beginnings of a faint smile lifted the corners of Riddle's wide-lipped mouth. She watched him absently stroke the gold-and-black signet ring he wore on his thin finger as he spoke.

"I perform quite well in school," he said slowly, watching her, "partly because I'm aided by a charm."

"A— _what_?" Hermione was utterly thrown. "What charm? Don't tell me—" She couldn't believe what she was hearing, and her soprano voice went shrill. "You're lying! That's not possible, there's an Anti-Cheating Spell during the exam—"

"I never said I cheated, Miss Granger," he said, very quietly. "By charm… I meant what some would call a good luck charm."

Hermione's jaw dropped. She couldn't help her disappointment—she'd expect this sort of superstitious nonsense from the Hogwarts Professor that taught Divination, a subject she had long dropped, but definitely not from studious, genius Tom Riddle.

"I'm sorry, Riddle," Hermione said superciliously, "but by a good luck charm, do you mean a commonplace object which one perceives is a source of good luck even though there is no reliable magic or scientific logic to support that assumption?"

The smile on his beautiful face broadened, but his dulcet baritone remained level and quiet.

"Yes," he said mildly. "That would be it. I take it you don't approve?"

"It's not about approval," Hermione retorted. She was a little astonished he didn't know of her infamous distaste for superstitions given that it had made news in her cohort that she'd dropped Divination, but then again, she supposed he was in a whole other league of his own to pay much attention to the younger cohorts in Hogwarts. "I just don't agree that you should credit your achievements with anything but hard work and brains."

Riddle studied her some more with faint interest, and she thought she saw a little gleam emerge in those bottomless dark gulfs for eyes.

"Would you," he said, "like to place a bet with me, Miss Granger?"

"A bet?" Hermione echoed. She didn't know why, but her pulse had begun to escalate.

"Yes, a bet," Riddle acknowledged, with a smile. It enhanced his attractiveness in a way that threatened to dazzle her, and she wondered how many girls he'd pulled it on. "I have quite a bit of faith in the lucky charm, and I think it would be rather interesting to challenge your views about it."

"And how do you propose to do that?" Hermione inquired archly, intrigued despite herself. "I should warn you, though, that I stand strongly by my views. It's very unlikely I will change them."

"I wouldn't expect anything less," he said quietly. "If you still choose to stand by them after a week, then I will concede defeat."

"And how will you change my mind for the coming week?" Hermione queried pompously, raising her brow.

"I will loan it to you," Riddle said plainly.

Hermione's eyes nearly popped from their sockets.

"Loan it?" she gaped. "You will loan your good luck charm to me?"

"Yes," he replied, amused at her visible flabbergast. "You might find that for the coming week, your fortune might change, Miss Granger."

It took all of Hermione's willpower to keep her jaw from nearly unhinging itself.

"I highly doubt it, Riddle," she forced out tautly. "If you think that lending me a random object would magically transform my week, then I'm afraid you're sorely mistaken. Unless it's Felix Felicis, I stand by my words."

"Should we test that belief of yours, then?" Riddle suggested quietly. "We'll see who is right, you or me…"

She sucked in a sharp breath. Offhandedly she recalled her declaration at the Slug Club meeting, which she'd made abundantly clear to just about everyone present, including the very person she'd been addressing.

_"Then I suppose," she announced impetuously, "that it's going to be a competition between you and me, Mr. Riddle."_

Galvanised by the memory, she squared her shoulders and tilted her curly head to lock eyes with him. He was tall, very tall, and now that she paid attention she realised that he towered over her by at least half a foot.

"All right then," Hermione announced imperiously, refusing to let his height daunt her. "I'll give you my most honest feedback in a week's time. I promise you that."

His porcelain face was expressionless for a nanosecond, but not before she saw that little gleam in his abyssal eyes flare a tad brighter. In the scintillating firelight, the gleam looked crimson, though she was sure it was obviously just an illusion—a trick of the light.

"Very well," Riddle said. "Then I take it we have an agreement."

His slender, long-fingered hand emerged from the pocket of his Slytherin robes, revealing his wand. He lifted the instrument gracefully without a sound, and Hermione saw what looked to be two silvery ribbons cascade from the tip of his wand.

The ribbons entwined and elongated elegantly in a pearly glide up around his hand, and Hermione's mouth went dry when she saw the ends of the glissading ribbons latch themselves onto the band of his signet ring. Then there was a flick of his wand, and just like that, the ribbons and the ring both dissipated from his hand.

They were gone.

"Wha—" Hermione burst out, stunned. Whatever else she was about to say was cut off by a weight that landed on her chest and which placed a mild pressure on her airways.

_What in the world...?_

Unthinkingly, she plunged her hands down the front of her Gryffindor robes and below her buttoned blouse. Her fingers closed over what felt like cold metal, and she tugged at it, her brown eyes widening when she discovered she was clutching a silvery chain the same lustrous colour as the ribbons from Riddle's wand. They _were_ the ribbons, she concluded.

She continued pulling at the chain around her neck until a small black stone surfaced, its scratched surface gleaming like molten obsidian against the firelight.

It was the stone on his signet ring.

"This is," Hermione gasped, her clammy fingers skimming the rounded black stone and the aureate band that surrounded it, " _your_ _good luck charm_?"

"Oh, yes," Riddle said quietly, his irises gleaming. "You'll find it does its intended job quite nicely."

She couldn't believe it. The signet ring that she'd seen him constantly wear had been his supposed good luck charm all along?

"Well... We'll see about that," was all she said, her voice raspy. She closed her fingers tighter around the stone, then released it. The newly fashioned pendant thumped gently against her chest, right in between the slope of her breasts, and she was intensely aware of his smothering dark gaze following the movement of his pendant.

Her heartbeat sped up, and she could feel heat suffuse her cheeks. Unable to help herself, Hermione looked away quickly, too flustered to meet his eyes.

The stone was a mystery and a contradiction, she thought. Even though Riddle had been wearing it just moments ago, the stone was inexplicably cool to the touch. And despite the scratches on the stone's surface, the stone had felt oddly smooth to the touch as well.

Cool and smooth—

 _Just like him_ , she reflected vaguely as she tucked the pendant under her robes, the cold and smooth stone resting closely against her rapidly beating heart. Its familiar coolness seemed to sear right through her flesh and into her bones, pervading and infiltrating every inch of her.

It was overall a strangely intimate feeling; almost, she thought, as if she was wearing a little fragment of his soul on her being.

"Well then," Hermione said at last, clearing her throat hastily when her voice came out unnaturally high-pitched. "Let's see if your so-called lucky charm does its job on me, shall we?"

Riddle, who had already turned to leave, smiled guilelessly back at her.

"Oh," he said softly. "I rather believe it will."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope some questions were answered in this chapter. I think the ring's purpose is quite obvious here.
> 
> As usual, thank you for all the Kudos/comments! x


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As everyone has stated previously—yes, the ring is a Horcrux. :)

_She lay there, feeling like she was drifting precariously afloat on a barely-there cloud. The sensation was utterly surreal; she felt as light as a feather, almost weightless, her mind immersed in a deep fog. She didn't know how long she lay there in the soothing nothingness, hovering afloat, but the startlingly cool sensation of long spidery fingers stroking her bare flesh jolted through her system like lightning._

_She tried to raise her head to take a closer look, but the thick hypnotic fog clouding her senses was almost oppressive in the way it engulfed and chained her down. Even though she couldn't see, she recognised the long adroit fingers cupping her thighs. She'd seen those pale long-fingered hands countless times, had watched them more often than she liked to admit, especially at how the golden-and-black signet ring gleamed on a slender middle finger. She'd watched those porcelain fingers turn pages on a book, watched them gracefully maneuver a quill, and watched them curl around his gleaming wand._

_And if she was being completely honest with herself, she'd imagined from time to time those long slender fingers curling similarly around her skin. How would the touch of them feel? Would they be warm? Or cold?_

Both, _she found out. They felt like cold smouldering metal, burning unstoppably into her soft flesh and making her thighs tremble. The band of his signet ring bit sharply into her. It was unnerving and titillating at the same time, and her whole body felt like a taut string, her heart pounding as she continued drifting in limbo._

_She couldn't look down on herself, but instinctively she was aware that she was naked. She felt exposed and stripped to the bone, and she wondered weakly through a druggish haze if she was flushing. Whenever she got embarrassed, she'd flush, and she'd flush very obviously too, all the way down to the roots of her bushy hair._

_In the corner of her mind, she heard a deep, baritone laugh, the voice behind the laugh so deep, silky and masculine that it echoed down her spine and settled right in between her legs. The silkiness of the baritone voice held an unprecedented sensual, carnal undertone to it that she'd never heard from him before, and she bit her lip to hold back a moan._

_The tip of his elegant, patrician finger traced a deliberate, scorching line along the inside of her bare thigh, and her breath caught at the direction his finger was moving towards. It glissaded smoothly further towards her until it stopped right at where the beginning of her thigh met the junction between her legs._

_She lay there, filled to the brim with an all-consuming ache of fear, anticipation and want. It couldn't be happening. It simply couldn't—_

_The tip of his finger teased an unruly curl of hair at her core, and her mouth opened soundlessly. She heard the familiar deep laugh from a distance again and felt his adroit finger delve deeper into her, casually coiling a strand of curly hair around it. He pulled at it very gently but also deliberately, and she arched her back a little, hissing at the tiny shock of pain it ignited._

_Then the finger released the strand of hair and glided further through the thatch of her pubic curls until it was caressing her folds. To her embarrassment, she was already wet, and she could feel herself leaking onto that single finger._

_She couldn't see him, couldn't see the boy's face, but she knew that he was smiling. She'd seen the smiles that occasionally curved that aristocratic, wide-lipped mouth, and yet strangely enough, she could feel this particular smile even without seeing it for herself now._

_It was a different smile, she realised. The smiles she'd seen were charming, polite and magnetic, and they possessed a veneer of civility, but this smile—it wasn't that._

_It was cruel._

_A part of her wanted to try to raise her foggy head and see the cruel smile for herself, but there was another part of her too frightened to do so. Before she could make up her mind, his finger slowly caressed a long, lingering line down her damp folds, and the sensation made her body jerk._

_He pushed at the dripping flesh gently, parting her folds with another finger, and she moaned as she felt herself being further exposed to him. Her heart shuddered in her chest as his elegant fingers stroked her at an agonisingly slow pace, drawing out the sensation and stoking the growing fire within her. Undeterred, he continued stroking her as she grew wetter and wetter._

_And then one of his nimble, spidery fingers slid down into her center, and all the air left her lungs when she realised he was at where the slit of her opening was._

_"Wait—" she tried to cry out, but her voice wouldn't leave her clogged throat, and then the tip of his finger began to breach her._

_It felt so invasive, so illicit, so wrong, and yet she'd never felt more aroused. Her insides clenched onto him as he entered her further, his long slim finger sliding into her slippery wetness like butter. If not for the sluggishness of her limbs, she would definitely have writhed uncontrollably from where she lay, but instead all she could do was moan and whimper. Her tight channel closed around him in a scalding vice-grip, and to her shock, he unapologetically inserted another slender finger into her. She could feel the hard cold ridges of his signet ring pushing against her slickness, and she quivered as she dripped copiously onto the ring._

_The friction of his digits sinking inside of her was heightening her arousal to near unbearable levels, and she found herself desperately rocking her hips against him for more of that addictive, mind-addling friction. So caught up by her pursuit of the friction was she that she barely registered his soft, velvety deep laugh._

_The laughter sounded amused and yet simultaneously mocking, with an undertone that was almost as cruel as his smile. It elicited goosebumps on her skin, and her moans rose sharply in pitch when he abruptly withdrew his long elegant fingers from inside of her._

_Whatever protest was about to spill from her lips was immediately silenced when he slammed his deft fingers back into her with a punishing force._

_She screamed._

_He continued thrusting his long spidery fingers into her with the same unforgiving strength—the sort of brutality she hadn't expected from a regal creature so outwardly polished, poised and civilised—and she cried out louder, the tension in her lower belly escalating rapidly to its breaking point. Now and then she would feel the icy solidness of his signet ring dig into her, and it transformed the overwhelming friction into a white-hot haze of pleasure-pain._

_And then she finally heard his voice: the cultured, smooth deep baritone like that of crushed velvet. Despite the brutal, unrelenting pace at which he repeatedly drove those dexterous digits into her, his voice was cool, almost detached even, and so very, very soft._

"Come, Miss Granger. Now."

Her eyes flew open, and the next thing she knew, her back was arching under her sheets as she came.

It was one of the most intense climaxes she'd ever had, and her hands fisted at the sides as she rode out the waves of pleasure wrecking her slight frame.

The high of her orgasm gradually subsided, and Hermione crumpled back onto her bed as all the strength in her limbs gave out. She could still feel her nether muscles twitching with aftershocks of her release, and she shuddered with a choked gasp. She didn't have to look down to see that she was drenched, with her knickers utterly ruined.

She'd clamped her lips shut as she climaxed, not wanting to make any sound and awaken the other girls sleeping in the dormitory. But now as reality fully returned, she blanched, overcome with a sweeping hot rush of shame and mortification that turned her complexion bright red under her comforter. She had never been more glad for the creamy curtains enveloping her four poster bed, keeping her out of view from the other girls.

She—prim, proper Hermione Granger—had just had a wet dream about Tom Marvolo Riddle. Worst, she had actually _climaxed_ from that dream.

Technically, Hermione hadn't seen his face or any other part of him at all, not even those invisible fingers inside of her, but she had known deep in her bones who it was. She'd recognised the soft laughter, the quiet cultured voice, and the cold burn of those porcelain long fingers even though she had never once felt them on her.

There was no denying the fact that even without seeing him, she'd just dreamed of the Head Boy.

"God," Hermione groaned in a whisper, her face buried in her downy pillow. She reached down to the hem of her nightgown and stripped off her doused knickers before tossing them vehemently to the floor like they were on fire. Then she slapped her hands over the sides of her flaming cheeks. "No. No no no."

How was she ever going to face him again? Like it or not, she was going to see the Head Boy again, if not for the Slug Club meetings (she still wasn't sure if she'd been officially booted from the club), then for the prefect meetings and the regular evening patrols she had to undertake as a prefect. How was she supposed to face him when she'd actually orgasmed to a wet dream of him? In her dream, he hadn't been the gracious, polite and sophisticated Tom Riddle she knew, and whom everyone knew.

He'd been more than that. In her fantasy, he'd been… visceral, punishing, even cruel. She hadn't seen his features, hadn't seen him smile, but there had been a hint of cruelty in that soft liquid voice that she had never heard before.

She grew suddenly aware of a weight between her breasts, and she dipped her hand through her crumpled nightgown, her fingers finding the metallic silvery chain on her clavicles. Her blood crystallised as the memory of the good luck charm he had loaned her returned in full force, and swiftly, she yanked at the chain until the scratched obsidian stone at the end of it revealed itself through the neckline of her nightgown. With her other hand she fumbled for her wand on the nightstand and illuminated the tip of it, then directed her attention back to the stone.

Her brown eyes widened, and a ragged gasp tore from her throat.

The stone was covered in a sheen of wetness, causing it to glitter in the shadows.

She wrapped her fingers around it, and her lungs shrank at the slickness coating the cool black stone. She recognised the texture of the slickness, and as she pulled her fingers back, a miniature string of the viscous liquid hung from her hand to the gleaming stone.

Hermione expelled a breathy squeak as she immediately let go of the stone, which fell back to the hollow between her heaving breasts with a muffled thump. She sat there on her bed, her face as crimson as tomato and her breathing shallow as she felt the dampness of the stone from the signet ring run down her skin in a slow, teasing rivulet.

She knew what the wetness was. She'd felt it on her fingers often enough during the couple of times she would touch herself late at night. By now she was completely familiar with the viscid texture that came with her release.

The bigger question was— _why was it on the stone?_

It was just a dream. It was all just a dream, from his voice to his fingers and the way the signet ring had ground into her from where the base of his ringed middle finger had penetrated her body. In her dream, she'd spilled all over his fingers and the ring like a broken dam.

But that was all it was. A dream. So why the hell was the stone of the signet ring he had loaned her wet?

The only explanation Hermione could think of was something she simply didn't want to think of.

She'd never sleepwalked or suffered from somnambulism before, and if she had, no one had ever noticed and informed her. But she knew somnambulism didn't just involve sleepwalking, which it was more commonly known as. It involved any kind of action, even more complex ones, performed by an individual while in a deep sleep. And recently, her sleep had been filled with fitful dreams, though they had been terribly disjointed and she hadn't been able to remember most of them. She'd woken up confused and disoriented.

Yet she remembered this dream perfectly.

And while she'd been dreaming this dream, it was completely possible that she'd pried the pendant from her chest, slipped it to the apex of her thighs, and used it to…

She grabbed her illuminated wand, her heart thrashing in her ribcage. This was crazy. She was going mad. If what she suspected was true, she'd taken Riddle's signet ring and besmirched it when he'd loaned her his good luck charm out of the goodness of his heart. She couldn't believe she would do such a licentious thing, even if she'd been asleep. The fact of the matter was, she couldn't believe such debauchery actually existed within her subconsciousness.

Hermione tugged resolutely at the argent chain of the pendant until the obsidian stone emerged once more from the neckline of her dress. She then swept her wand to cast a cleaning spell, and even when the spell was complete she performed it again. The thought of having to return his precious signet ring with it stained by her… essence was enough to make her cringe.

 _Good luck charm my foot,_ she reflected with a grimace. All this had done was inform her of her somnambulism.

What she'd done was unforgivable. To say Hermione was disgusted with herself would have been an understatement. She couldn't believe she'd used something that clearly meant so much to the Head Boy to _pleasure_ herself. She didn't think she'd ever live with herself if he found out. Why? Why in the heavens would she do something so warped, so repugnant? She'd always envisioned herself above most forms of perversion.

Her fingers tightened around the chilly stone. It was obvious now, wasn't it? She hadn't acknowledged it even to herself up to this point, but she couldn't ignore the truth anymore.

She was attracted to Tom Riddle.

And she probably had been for some time, presumably ever since he had performed the Freezing Charm on the redhead that had attempted to assault her. Either that, or she'd grown attracted to him ever since their rendezvous at the prefects' bathroom, where he'd casually disrobed in front of her as if she wasn't even here.

 _Just marvellous_ , Hermione thought dourly. Now she was no different from most of the female population at Hogwarts. She'd always liked to think of herself as exceptional and infallible, and above everyone else, but she was starting to realise it wasn't exactly true.

She'd never understood relationships, never understood why other students would stoop so low as to canoodle in the library or even a lavatory. Wasn't Hogwarts a school? Everyone was here to study, and there should be nothing else that took precedence over that.

She lay back onto the bed, setting her wand aside. Right. That was it. She was here to study. To excel. She refused to entertain anything else that was irrelevant to her studies, and that included whatever pubertal fantasies that plagued her. _Just hormones,_ Hermione concluded. Ten years down the road she would be an accomplished witch working at the Ministry of Magic, possibly even as the Minister of Magic, and her fleeting crush on the Head Boy of her school would be nothing but a laughable memory of the past.

Satisfied, mollified and galvanised by her assessment of the future, Hermione released the stone, and it fell back onto her chest with the same gentle thump from before. She closed her eyes, listening to her own unsteady breathing, which contrasted steeply with the sounds of the even, measured breathing of the sleeping girls in the dormitory. Burrowing further under her comforter, she willed herself to focus on the sounds of their breathing to lull herself back to sleep.

She didn't know how long it took, but the last thing she remembered before it finally all went black was the cold burn of the signet stone between her breasts.

It felt almost like porcelain fingers gripping her heart.

* * *

"Hermione?"

She looked up blearily from the toast she was buttering. "What?"

Harry's green eyes were concerned from where he sat opposite her by the breakfast table in the Great Hall. He leaned in tentatively towards her, and cleared his throat.

"That's, er, a spoon, Hermione," he said.

She stopped, then peered down at what she was doing. To her horror and embarrassment, she'd been attempting in vain to butter her toast with a spoon the past couple of minutes, which explained why she'd been at it for so long.

Instantly Hermione put the spoon down with a pointed cough and grabbed her knife instead. She resumed buttering her toast, this time with more dignity, though she made sure not to meet anyone else's eye at the awkward silence that ensued.

There was the sound of someone clearing their throat again, but Hermione soon registered that it wasn't Harry this time. She raised her head to see that Ron, who had been sitting next to Harry in silence up to this point, had put down his utensils and was glancing awkwardly at her.

Well, wasn't that odd? Ever since their spat, he'd practically acted like she hadn't existed for the past two days, which she'd frigidly reciprocated. This was the first time since their argument that he'd actually acknowledged her presence. No, not just that—as Harry nudged him encouragingly and Ron's mouth opened, Hermione realised he was now initiating a conversation with her.

"Is everything…" His voice came out a little higher than normal, and Ron cleared his throat noisily again. "Is everything all right with you, Hermione? You look… tired."

Hermione knew what his initiating the conversation meant: he was basically extending an olive branch to her. For a few seconds she didn't say anything as she debated internally on how she planned to react. It didn't take her long, however, to come to a decision. Even though Ron had most certainly been in the wrong for the accusatory things he'd spouted at her before, she had far more concerns on her plate now than their vapid little spat. And she was simply too fatigued to handle any more conflict. The nightmare the Slug Club meeting had been had worn her out enough.

"I'm fine," Hermione answered, and both Harry and Ron immediately looked relieved at her response. "I just haven't been sleeping very well, that's all. There's nothing more to it."

"How come?" Ron asked, the look of relief still etched on his freckled features. "Bad dreams?"

Hermione almost choked on the pumpkin juice she was drinking. Hastily, she said, averting her eyes, "No, no. Just… I'm just worried about—classes."

She prayed inwardly that no one would notice how her cheeks had pinkened.

"What's there to worry about?" Ron demanded. "You're at the top of our classes as usual." Then, upon noticing that he might have sounded a tad grumpy, he added quickly, "Which is really, er, impressive, of course."

"Well, I still haven't figured out how to brew the Draught of Living Death, if you remember," Hermione responded tartly, in a bid to change the subject. The less the boys talked about and knew of her dreams, the better. Something else that neither Harry nor Ron knew about, of course, was the stone pendant that lay hidden under the front of her robes, and she planned to keep it this way. "Until I get that right, I won't rest."

"We're supposed to learn that in our sixth year, Hermione," Harry reminded her. "There's no need to be so hard on yourself right now."

"No," Hermione snapped. Her hands clenched so tightly around her toast until it nearly broke apart. "Do you know what Fred told me?"

"What?" Harry looked mystified.

"He said that Tom—" Realising what she was about to say, Hermione caught herself. "Never mind."

"Yeah, I know," Ron said shortly. He slammed his goblet down onto the table with more force than was necessary. "Tom Riddle brewed the Draught of Living Death in his fourth year, didn't he? He made it perfectly. George told me before too."

"He was just lucky," Hermione bit out. "Or he cheated. Because I've followed the instructions in the textbook to a tee, and it still doesn't work. I don't understand it! I've reread it a million times. Have I misinterpreted the words wrongly? Surely not! I know my English is far better than most of you, so—"

"Thanks," Ron muttered.

Feeling too aggrieved at the thought of the potion, she dropped her half-finished toast back onto her plate and picked up her bag along with her school books.

"Where are you going?" Harry quizzed.

"To class, where else?" Hermione rejoined irritably, rising from her bench with her mountain of books in her arms.

"Transfiguration doesn't start for another fifteen minutes!" Ron called incredulously after her.

"Well, it doesn't hurt to be early," she snapped, not bothering to check for his response as she made a frenzied beeline for the entrance of the Great Hall. So caught up in a hurry was she that she bumped straight into someone, causing one of the leather-bound tomes piled up in her arms to slide and topple onto the ground with a resounding crash.

"Watch where you're going," a familiar acerbic voice hissed, and her heart plummeted when she recognised who it belonged to.

Rodolphus Lestrange.

With the rest of her books still miraculously balanced in her arms, Hermione shuffled around, wondering despairingly how she was supposed to retrieve her fallen book. Her wand was tucked in the pocket of her robes, but she couldn't possibly reach them with her arms occupied, and the same problem would apply if she tried to pick up her book with her occupied hands. Judging by the snickers coming from the Slytherins' table, she knew they'd picked up on her dilemma too.

Ignoring them, Hermione was about to perform a decidedly unladylike squat to try to reach for her book—she didn't really have an idea where she was going with this—when the hem of a emerald-lapelled Slytherin robe swept across her peripheral vision and an elegant long-fingered pale hand closed around the fallen leather tome on the stone ground. The hand, while slender, was large, and distinctively male.

She froze.

She knew the hand didn't belong to Lestrange. There was no mistaking that slender porcelain hand for anyone else, not when she knew Lestrange would never do such a thing for her, and definitely not when she recognised that the fingers of that very hand had been inside her just last night.

Or at least, they had been—in her shameful, licentious dream.

She watched dumbly as the long-fingered hand gracefully picked up the book before smoothly reaching out for her. Her breath hitched, but all the beautiful long hand did was wordlessly deposit it back onto the heap of similar tomes in her arms. Throughout it all, she kept her bushy head bent, not daring to look up.

The air was hushed, the snickers from the Slytherins silenced, and Hermione was acutely aware of everyone in the Great Hall staring. It was a well-known fact that Slytherins hardly got along with Gryffindors, especially not with Gryffindors who were Muggle-borns.

But it was just as well-known that the Head Boy of Hogwarts was the exception to his house.

Rapidly, she mumbled out a barely coherent word of thanks, still unable to look into the much taller boy's face. She could feel the stone of his ring burning like frostbite into the hollow between her breasts, and she stumbled frantically away, nearly upturning her books once more, and bolted out of the Great Hall like a wild animal.

And throughout it all—though she wasn't sure how much of it was her imagination—she could feel dark eyes drilling holes into her back.

Long after she had left the Great Hall, she could still feel them there.

* * *

The cauldron bubbled and boiled, and she stared with growing frustration at the deep maroon surface frothing inside it.

Again, just like the countless times before today, her version of the Draught of Living Death was maroon, and not the pale pink it was supposed to be. She could feel a tidal wave of intense agitation rising in her chest, and angrily she swiped away the frizzy hair—made even frizzier by the boiling steam of her potion—sticking to her sweaty flushed face.

It was the seventh time she had tried to make it now, and it was the seventh time she had failed. Why?! The notion of failure was abominable and unfamiliar, weighing her down like lead in the pits of her stomach. Every sentence of instruction in the sixth-year textbook she'd snagged from Diagon Alley had been underlined until the haphazard layers of ink had begun to smudge.

So what had she done wrong?

Swallowed up by an unadulterated deluge of sudden rage, Hermione grabbed a chair in the empty classroom she was in and flung it violently onto the floor. The frail wooden legs hit the floor with a muted thud, but the sound wasn't enough for her.

She whipped her wand across the air, and several desks sailed into the air before slamming against the blackboard at the front of the classroom. This time the racket it made was much louder and sharper, and Hermione stopped, panting as the desks collapsed in a cacophonous heap to the castle floor.

She didn't know how long she stood there, her vision filtered by a red mist as she glared at the chaos she had made, the botched cauldron still bubbling softly in the air. Eventually, however, she felt her uneven breathing slow, and some of her aggravation started to pass. As ironical as it was, a semblance of serenity hung amidst the wild havoc she stood in.

The last thing she expected was to see the desks move again—and not by her wand this time.

Hermione let loose with a little squeak, and she leapt back with both shock and bewilderment as the desks rearranged themselves back to their original spots in the classroom. The leg of one of the desks, which had been dented from the impact against the blackboard, snapped itself back into shape with a _crack_. Even the upturned chair on the floor levitated itself back atop all four wooden legs, and then glided silently forward to its assigned desk.

Driven solely by instinct, her brown eyes snapped to the doorway of the classroom, and her mouth went agape at the tall figure that stood there. For a terrifying second she thought it was one of the professors who'd caught her in her little vandalism act, but then she saw the familiar dark swathe of the school robes, along with emerald-green hints of a tie and the underside of the robes.

All the air escaped her lungs, and the inside of her mouth went terribly dry as the newcomer's bottomless dark eyes did an appraising sweep over the now restored and much neater classroom. It was late in the evening, she realised, and it made sense that some prefects—including the Head Boy and Girl—might be on patrol. Practising potions in here was fine, but upturning desks and chairs like a lunatic was not.

She squared her shoulders defensively, bracing herself for whatever reprimand she was about to receive from the Head Boy. Unable to take the suffocating silence that continued to ensue as those obsidian eyes calmly took in the boiling cauldron in the center of the classroom, she blurted in an agitated, shrill voice, "I was just experimenting!"

Riddle didn't answer right away, his wordless gaze still on the sweltering maroon shade of her potion. Hermione cleared her throat pointedly at once, and then, with a single swift and deft flick of her wand, promptly cleared the contents of her cauldron. Instantly the light bubbling sounds of her vanished potion faded away into nothingness, further heightening the asphyxiating silence that lapsed in its wake. She could feel her stomach rolling.

 _Don't think about the dream,_ she thought, the pendant burning cold between her breasts. _Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Don't—_

"The Draught of Living Death," Riddle said quietly. His voice was soft, but the glint in his eyes betrayed his interest. "That was why you sought to destroy the classroom?"

Hermione flushed.

"I wasn't trying to destroy it," she snapped. "I would have restored it to its original state in a moment."

This time, his dark eyes were not on the empty cauldron, or on any other part of the classroom—they were just on her. She was instantly acutely conscious of how her bushy, frizzy hair had turned twice its size from the steam of her botched potion, and she cursed mentally, wishing she was anywhere but here. It was hard to tell under the dim lighting cast by the few candles inside the classroom, but she could have sworn that one side of Riddle's pale lips had moved slightly upwards.

But a second later the movement was completely gone, and when he finally responded to her, there was no amusement in his baritone voice.

"You should treat the walls of this castle with respect," Riddle said calmly, and something about the frank, flat way he spoke told her he meant every word. "For that..." He canted his raven head faintly at her, his handsome pale features expressionless.

"That will be five points from Gryffindor, Miss Granger," he said quietly.

Hermione flushed again, her hands fisting at her sides, but she bit back a scathing, heated protest. Like it or not, she'd been in the wrong, and any teacher standing in his position would likely have done the same thing. Riddle had pardoned enough of her past mishaps—even if she hadn't been at fault for some of them—and as a prefect herself, she _should_ have known better. She was probably fortunate enough that he hadn't decided to revoke her prefect badge. And yet, out of everything that made her wince now, what stung the most was knowing that his opinion of her had probably gone further downhill.

Before she could attempt in any way to defuse the situation, he held out his wand, aiming it unexpectedly at the cauldron. With a soft crackle, the fire under it kindled again in a bright tangerine blaze.

_What?_

"What are you—" Hermione began astoundedly, but he flicked his wand lazily and the textbook soared into the air from where she'd left it on a nearby desk. The book opened in mid-air and the pages flipped speedily in a yellowed blur until they returned to the section under the Draught of Living Death.

Hermione's lips parted as she attempted to speak once more. "What are you doing?" she demanded weakly, though even as she asked she was beginning to guess just what.

"Try it again," Riddle said.

This time, despite how slight it was, she could definitely see that he was smiling. Inconceivably, her mind flew right back to the silky baritone laughter pervading her dreams just the night before—and the near-cruel undertone to it, like a nebulous yet lingering caress of a serpent's tongue.

And with the laughter came the unbidden, visceral memory of long spidery fingers inside her, and it took everything she had not to physically flinch and look away.

"Try the potion again," Riddle repeated. "But this time..." His slight smile curved his sensuous lips further as he walked soundlessly towards her, and in that moment she almost thought she felt the stone of his hidden signet ring beat like an ice-cold heart against her own.

"This time...?" Hermione cut in quickly, her breathing escalating and her cheeks suffused with pink.

"This time," he said softly, "I'm going to watch you."


End file.
